Brian Aldiss


Brian Wilson Aldiss was an English writer, artist and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s.
Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss was a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society. He was co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group with Harry Harrison. Aldiss was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1999 and inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. He received two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He wrote the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long", the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Aldiss was associated with the British New Wave of science fiction.

Life and career

Early life, education and military service

Brian Wilson Aldiss was born on 18 August 1925, above his paternal grandfather's draper's shop in Dereham, Norfolk. When Aldiss's grandfather died, his father, Bill, sold his share in the shop and the family left Dereham. Aldiss's mother, Dot, was the daughter of a builder. He had an older sister who was stillborn and a younger sister. As a four-year-old, Aldiss started to write stories which his mother would bind and put on a shelf.
At the age of 6, Aldiss went to Framlingham College, but moved to Devon and was sent to board at West Buckland School in 1939 after the outbreak of World War II. As a child, he discovered the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He eventually read all the novels by H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. In 1943, he joined the Royal Signals and saw military action in Burma.

Writing and publishing

His army experience inspired the novel Hothouse and the Horatio Stubbs second and third books, A Soldier Erect and A Rude Awakening, respectively.
After the war, he worked as a bookseller in Oxford. He also wrote a number of short pieces for a booksellers' trade journal about life in a fictitious bookshop, which attracted the attention of Charles Monteith, an editor at the publisher Faber and Faber. As a result, Faber and Faber published Aldiss's first book, The Brightfount Diaries, a 200-page novel in diary form about the life of a sales assistant in a bookshop.
About this time, he also began to write science fiction for various magazines. According to ISFDB, his first speculative fiction in print was the short story Criminal Record, published by John Carnell in the July 1954 issue of Science Fantasy. Several of his stories appeared in 1955, including three in monthly issues of New Worlds, also edited by Carnell.
In 1954, The Observer newspaper ran a competition for a short story set in the year 2500. Aldiss's story Not For An Age was ranked third following a reader vote.
The Brightfount Diaries had been a minor success, and Faber asked Aldiss if he had any more writing they could look at with a view to publishing. Aldiss confessed to being a science fiction author, to the delight of the publishers, who had a number of science fiction fans in high places, and so his first science fiction book was published, a collection of short stories entitled Space, Time and Nathaniel. By this time, his earnings from writing matched his wages in the bookshop, and he made the decision to become a full-time writer.
Aldiss led the voting for Most Promising New Author of 1958 at the next year's Worldcon, but finished behind "no award". He was elected president of the British Science Fiction Association in 1960. He was the literary editor of the Oxford Mail newspaper from 1958 to 1969. Around 1964, he and long-time collaborator Harry Harrison started the first ever journal of science fiction criticism, Science Fiction Horizons, which during its brief span of two issues published articles and reviews by such authors as James Blish, and featured a discussion among Aldiss, C. S. Lewis, and Kingsley Amis in the first issue and an interview with William S. Burroughs in the second. In 1967, Algis Budrys listed Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany as "an earthshaking new kind of" writers, and leaders of the New Wave. Aldiss supported the New Wave movement, helping the magazine New Worlds to get financial backing from a 1967 Arts Council grant and publishing some of his more experimental work in the magazine.
Besides his own writings, he edited a number of anthologies. For Faber he edited Introducing SF, a collection of stories typifying various themes of science fiction, and Best Fantasy Stories. In 1961, he edited an anthology of reprinted short science fiction for the British paperback publisher Penguin Books under the title Penguin Science Fiction. This was remarkably successful, went into numerous reprints, and was followed up by two further anthologies: More Penguin Science Fiction and Yet More Penguin Science Fiction. The later anthologies enjoyed the same success as the first, and all three were eventually published together as The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, which also went into a number of reprints. In the 1970s, he produced several large collections of classic grand-scale science fiction, under the titles Space Opera, Space Odysseys, Galactic Empires, Evil Earths and Perilous Planets. Around this time, he edited a large-format volume Science Fiction Art, with selections of artwork from the magazines and pulps.
In response to the results from the planetary probes of the 1960s and 1970s, which showed that Venus was completely unlike the hot, tropical jungle usually depicted in science fiction, Aldiss and Harrison edited an anthology Farewell, Fantastic Venus, reprinting stories based on the pre-probe ideas of Venus. He also edited, with Harrison, a series of anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction.
Aldiss invented a form of extremely short story called the mini-saga. The Daily Telegraph hosted a competition for the best mini-saga for several years, and Aldiss was the judge. He edited several anthologies of the best mini-sagas.
Aldiss travelled to Yugoslavia, where he met fans in Ljubljana, Slovenia and published a travel book about Yugoslavia entitled Cities and Stones, his only work in the genre. He published an alternative-history fantasy story, "The Day of the Doomed King", about Serbian kings in the Middle Ages, and wrote a novel called The Malacia Tapestry, about an alternative Dalmatia.

Art

In addition to a highly successful career as a writer, Aldiss was an accomplished artist. His first solo exhibition, The Other Hemisphere, was held in Oxford, August–September 2010, and the exhibition's centrepiece Metropolis has since been released as a limited edition fine art print.
File:Brian Aldiss Blue Plaque.jpg|thumb|upright=0.6|Blue Plaque Dereham

Personal life

In 1948, Aldiss married Olive Fortescue, secretary to the owner of Sanders' bookseller's in Oxford, where he had worked since 1947. He had two children from his first marriage: Clive in 1955 and Caroline Wendy in 1959, but the marriage "finally collapsed" in 1959 and dissolved in 1965.
In 1965, he married his second wife, Margaret Christie Manson, a Scot and secretary to the editor of the Oxford Mail; Aldiss was 40, and she 31. They lived in Oxford and had two children together, Tim and Charlotte. She died in 1997.

Death

Aldiss died at his home in Headington, Oxford, on 19 August 2017, the day after his 92nd birthday.

Awards and honours

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1990.
Aldiss was the "Permanent Special Guest" at the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts from 1989 through 2008. He was also the Guest of Honor at the conventions in 1986 and 1999.
The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its 18th SFWA Grand Master in 1999 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2004.
He was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature in the 2005 Birthday Honours list.
Aldiss appeared twice on Desert Island Discs, first in 1982, when his choice of book was Rasselas by Samuel Johnson and his luxury a time machine. In January 2007 he appeared again: his choice of record to "save" was "Old Rivers" sung by Walter Brennan, his choice of book was John Heilpern's biography of John Osborne, and his luxury a banjo. Full lists of selections for both episodes are on the BBC website.
On 1 July 2008, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Liverpool in recognition of his contribution to literature. The Brian W Aldiss Archive at the university holds manuscripts from the period 1943–1995.
In 2013, Aldiss received the World Fantasy Convention Award at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, England.
Aldiss sat on the Council of the Society of Authors.
He won two Hugo awards: the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1962 for the Hothouse series; and the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book in 1987 for Trillion Year Spree. Aldiss also won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1965 for The Saliva Tree.

Works

Aldiss was the author of over 80 books and 300 short stories, as well as several volumes of poetry.

Novels

  • The Brightfount Diaries
  • Non-Stop,,,, US title Starship,
  • : On a massive generation ship whose inhabitants have descended into primitivism over 23 generations, a member of a culturally primordial tribe investigates the dark, jungle-filled corridors of the ship and slowly uncovers the true nature of the universe he inhabits.
  • The Interpreter,, US title Bow Down to Nul Ace D-443
  • : A short novel about the huge, old galactic empire of Nuls, a giant, three-limbed, civilised alien race. Earth is just a lesser-than-third-class colony ruled by a Nul tyrant whose deceiving devices together with good willing but ineffective attempts of a Nul Signatory to clarify the abuses and with the disorganised earthling resistance reflect the complex relationship existing between imperialists and subject races which Aldiss himself had the chance of seeing at first hand when serving in India and Indonesia in the forties.
  • The Male Response,
  • The Primal Urge,,. A satire on sexual reserve, it explores the effects on society of a forehead-mounted "Emotion Register" that glows when the wearer experiences sexual attraction. The book was banned in Ireland.
  • Hothouse,,, published in abridged form in the American market as The Long Afternoon of Earth. A fix-up novel based on short stories "Hothouse", "Nomansland", "Undergrowth", "Timberline" and "Evergreen". This assemblage of stories won the Hugo Award for short fiction in 1962.
  • : Set in a far future Earth, where the earth has stopped rotating, the Sun has increased output, and plants are engaged in a constant frenzy of growth and decay, like a tropical forest enhanced a thousandfold; a few small groups of elvish humans still live on the edge of extinction, beneath the giant banyan tree that covers the day side of the earth.
  • Greybeard,,,
  • : Set decades after the Earth's population has been sterilised as a result of nuclear bomb tests conducted in Earth's orbit, the book shows an emptying world, occupied by an aging, childless population.
  • The Dark Light Years,,,
  • : The encounter of humans with the utods, gentle aliens whose physical and mental health requires wallowing in mud and filth, and who – though they achieved interstellar space flight – are not even recognised as intelligent by the humans. The critic Fredric Jameson described The Dark Light Years as, along with Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest, "one of the major SF denunciations of the American genocide in Vietnam."
  • Earthworks,,,,,
  • An Age,,, US title Cryptozoic!,, a dystopic time-travel novel
  • Report on Probability A,,.,,
  • Barefoot in the Head,,,,,, a fix-up novel based on short stories: "Just Passing Through", "Multi-Value Motorway", "Still Trajectories", "The Serpent of Kundalini", "Drake-Man Route", and novelettes: "Auto-Ancestral Fracture", "Ouspenski's Astrabahn"
  • : Perhaps Aldiss's most experimental work, this first appeared in several parts as the Acid Head War series in New Worlds. Set in a Europe some years after a flare-up in the Middle East led to Europe being attacked with bombs releasing huge quantities of long-lived hallucinogenic drugs. Into an England with a population barely maintaining a grip on reality comes a young Serb, who himself starts coming under the influence of the ambient aerosols, and finds himself leading a messianic crusade. The narration and dialogue reflects the shattering of language under the influence of the drugs, in mutating phrases and puns and allusions, in a deliberate echo of Finnegans Wake.
  • Horatio Stubbs series:
  • # The Hand-Reared Boy,,
  • # A Soldier Erect,
  • # A Rude Awakening,
  • : Omnibus edition, The Horatio Stubbs Saga
  • Frankenstein Unbound,,,
  • : A 21st century politician is transported to 19th century Switzerland where he encounters Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster and Mary Shelley.
  • The Eighty Minute Hour, or The 80 minute Hour,,,
  • : A weird and ambitious "space opera" whose characters actually sing. The world is in chaos after nuclear war causes time slips and even those that believe they rule the world have trouble knowing where and when they are.
  • The Malacia Tapestry,,,,
  • : A picaresque novel with fantasy elements, set in a city not unlike Venice. However, it is a Venice without Christianity or monotheism, existing within an alternate version of Renaissance or Early Baroque Italy.
  • Brothers of the Head,
  • : A large-format book, illustrated by Ian Pollock, tells the strange story of the rock stars Tom and Barry Howe, Siamese twins with a third, dormant head that eventually starts to awaken.
  • Enemies of the System,,,
  • Moreau's Other Island,, or An Island Called Moreau,
  • Squire Quartet series:
  • # Life in the West,
  • # Forgotten Life,,
  • # Remembrance Day,,
  • # Somewhere East of Life,
  • Helliconia Trilogy
  • # Helliconia Spring,,,
  • #: BSFA Award; Campbell Memorial Award; Nebula Award finalist
  • # Helliconia Summer,,,
  • #: BSFA finalist; Locus Award, fourth place
  • # Helliconia Winter,,,
  • #: BSFA; Nebula finalist; Locus, fifth place
  • : Omnibus edition, Helliconia
  • Ruins, novella
  • The Year Before Yesterday, or Cracken at Critical,,,, a fix-up novel based on novelette "Equator" and novella "The Impossible Smile"
  • Dracula Unbound,
  • White Mars or, the Mind Set Free,, with Roger Penrose
  • Super-State
  • The Cretan Teat
  • Affairs at Hampden Ferrers
  • Sanity and the Lady
  • Jocasta
  • : A re-telling of Sophocles's Theban tragedies concerning Oedipus and Antigone. In Aldiss's novel, myth and magic are vibrantly real, experienced through an evolving human consciousness. Amidst various competing interpretations of reality, including the appearance of a time-travelling Sophocles, Aldiss provides an alternative explanation of the Sphinx's riddle.
  • HARM,
  • : Campbell Award nominee
  • Walcot
  • : Family saga spanning the 20th century
  • Finches of Mars
  • ''Comfort Zone''