Brian Aldiss

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Biography

Poet, playwright, critic, fiction and science-fiction writer Brian W(ilson) Aldiss was born on 18 August 1925 in Dereham, Norfolk, and is the author of more than 75 books. He was educated at Framlingham College, Suffolk, and West Buckland School, Devon, and served in the Royal Signals between 1943 and 1947.

After leaving the army Aldiss worked as a bookseller in Oxford for almost a decade, an experience which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955), a volume of short stories. His first science fiction novel, Non-Stop, was published in 1958 while he was working as literary editor of the Oxford Mail, a post he held between 1958 and 1969. His many prize-winning science fiction titles include Hothouse (1962), which won the Hugo Award, The Saliva Tree (1966), which was awarded the Nebula, and Helliconia Spring (1982), which won both the British Science Fiction Association Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He edited SF Horizons: A Magazine of Criticism and Comment with his friend, the science fiction novelist Harry Harrison, and he has edited numerous anthologies, including Introducing SF: A Science Fiction Anthology (1964). He has also written science fiction criticism, most recently, The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy (1995), as well as introductions to classic novels including Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1983).

Brian Aldiss's autobiographical fiction includes The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) and A Soldier Erect (1971), and he has also written three volumes of autobiography, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's: A Writing Life (1990), The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman (1998) and When the Feast is Finished (1999). He is the author of several poetry collections, including Home Life with Cats (1992); A Plutonian Monologue on His Wife's Death (2000) and A Prehistory of Mind (2008).

Several of his books, including Frankenstein Unbound (filmed 1990), have been adapted for the cinema. His story, 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long', was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. His book Jocasta (2005), is a reworking of Sophocles' classic Theban plays, Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Cultural Breaks (2006), published to coincide with his eightieth birthday, is a collection of short fictions which includes commentaries on his work by his peers. His latest novel is Harm (2007).

Brian Aldiss is the recipient of numerous international awards for science-fiction writing including a Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and a Prix Jules Verne (Sweden). He lives in Oxford and was awarded an OBE in 20005 for Services to Literature.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Autobiography, Criticism, Drama, Fiction, Poetry, Science-fiction, Screenplay, Short stories

Bibliography

The Brightfount Diaries   Faber and Faber, 1955

Space, Time and Nathaniel   Faber and Faber, 1957

Non-Stop   Faber and Faber, 1958

Canopy of Time   Faber and Faber, 1959

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand   Granada, 1960

Penguin Science Fiction: An Anthology   (editor)   Penguin, 1961

The Interpreter   Brown, Watson, 1961

The Male Response   Dobson, 1961

Best Fantasy Stories   Faber and Faber, 1962

Hothouse   Faber and Faber, 1962

More Penguin Science Fiction: An Anthology   (editor)   Penguin, 1963

The Airs of Earth   Faber and Faber, 1963

Greybeard   Faber and Faber, 1964

Introducing SF: A Science Fiction Anthology   Faber and Faber, 1964

The Dark Light Years   Faber and Faber, 1964

Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian W. Aldiss   Faber and Faber, 1965

Earthworks   Faber and Faber, 1965

Cities and Stones: A Traveller's Jugoslavia   Faber and Faber, 1966

The Saliva Tree, and Other Strange Growths   Faber and Faber, 1966

An Age   Faber and Faber, 1967

Nebula Award Stories 2   (editor with H. Harrison)   Gollancz, 1967

Farewell, Fantastic Venus!   Macdonald & Co., 1968

Intangibles Inc. and Other Stories   Faber and Faber, 1968

Report on Probability A   Faber and Faber, 1968

The Future Makers: A Selection of Science Fiction from Brian Aldiss   Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968

A Brian Aldiss Omnibus   Sidgwick and Jackson, 1969

Barefoot in the Head   Faber and Faber, 1969

The Inner Landscape   (Mervyn Peake, J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss)   Allison & Busby, 1969

The Hand-Reared Boy   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970

The Shape of Further Things   Faber and Faber, 1970

A Soldier Erect   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971

Brian Aldiss Omnibus II   Sidgwick and Jackson, 1971

The Moment of Eclipse   Faber and Faber, 1971

Billion Year Spree   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973

Equator and Segregation   New English Libary, 1973

Frankenstein Unbound   Cape, 1973

The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus: An Anthology   (editor)   Penguin, 1973

The Eighty-Minute Hour: A Space Opera   (editor)   Cape, 1974

Decade: the 1940s   (editor with H. Harrison)   Macmillan, 1975

Evil Earths   (editor)   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975

Hell's Cartographers   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975

Science Fiction Art: The Fantasies of SF   (editor)   New English Library, 1975

Space Odysseys: A New Look at Yesterday's Futures   (editor)   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975

Decade: The 1950s   (editor with H. Harrison)   Macmillan, 1976

Galactic Empires: Volumes I and II   (editor)   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976

The Malacia Tapestry   Cape, 1976

The Primal Urge   Panther, 1976

The Year's Best Science Fiction No. 9   (editor with H. Harrison)   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976

Brothers of the Head   Pierrot, 1977

Decade: The 1960s   (editor with H. Harrison)   Macmillan, 1977

Last Orders   Cape, 1977

A Rude Awakening   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978

Enemies of the System   Cape, 1978

Perilous Planets   (editor)   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978

Science Fiction as Science Fiction   Bran's Head Books, 1978

New Arrivals, Old Encounters: Twelve Stories   Cape, 1979

Pile: Petals from St. Klaed's Computer   Cape, 1979

This World and Nearer Ones   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979

Life in the West   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980

Moreau's Other Island   Cape, 1980

Farewell to a Child   (Poetry)   Priapus, 1982

Helliconia Spring   Cape, 1982

Helliconia Summer   Cape, 1983

Science Fiction Quiz   Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983

The Last Man/Mary Shelley   (Introduction)   Hogarth, 1983

Seasons in Flight   Cape, 1984

Helliconia Winter   Cape, 1985

My Country 'tis Not Only of Thee: A Story of the World after the Vietnam War   Brian Aldiss Appreciation Society, 1986

The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction: An Anthology   (editor with Sam J. Lundwall)   Penguin, 1986

Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction   (with David Wingrove)   Gollancz, 1986

Cracken at Critical   Kerosina, 1987

Ruins: A Novella   Hutchinson, 1987

Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss   Gollancz, 1988

Forgotten Life   Gollancz, 1988

A Romance of the Equator   Gollancz, 1989

Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's: A Writing Life   Hodder & Stoughton, 1990

Dracula Unbound   Grafton, 1991

Home Life with Cats   (poetry)   Grafton, 1992

Remembrance Day   HarperCollins, 1993

The Island of Dr. Moreau/H. G. Wells   (editor)   Dent, 1993

Somewhere East of Life: Another European Fantasia   HarperCollins, 1994

At the Caligula Hotel and Other Poems   Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995

The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy   Liverpool University Press, 1995

The Secret of This Book   HarperCollins, 1995

The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman   Little, Brown, 1998

When the Feast is Finished   (with Margaret Aldiss)   Little, Brown, 1999

White Mars Or, The Mind Set Free   Little, Brown, 1999

A Plutonian Monologue on His Wife's Death   (poetry)   Frogmore, 2000

Art after Apogee: The Relationships between an Idea, a Story, a Painting   (with Rosemary Phipps)   Avernus, 2000

Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time   Little, Brown, 2001

Super-State   Little, Brown, 2002

Affairs at Hampden Ferrers   Little, Brown, 2004

Jocasta   The Rose Press, 2005

Sanity and the Lady   PS Publishing, 2005

Cultural Breaks   Tachyon Publications, 2006

Harm   Del Rey Books, 2007

A Prehistory of Mind   Mayapple Press, 2008

Read about books by Brian Aldiss at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Brian Aldiss at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1962   Hugo Award   Hothouse

1966   Nebula Award   The Saliva Tree, and Other Strange Growths

1972   British Science Fiction Association Award   The Moment of Eclipse

1973   Hugo Award   Billion Year Spree

1974   Special BSFA Award   Billion Year Spree

1976   Eurocon Merit Award   Billion Year Spree

1977   Ferrara Silver Comet   Science Fiction Art: the Fantasies of SF

1977   Prix Jules Verne (Sweden)   Non-Stop

1982   British Science Fiction Association Award   Helliconia Spring

1982   John W. Campbell Memorial Award   Helliconia Spring

1983   Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany)

1987   Hugo Award   Trillion Year Spree

2005   OBE

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Critical Perspective

Brian Aldiss is an internationally famous science fiction writer, particularly honoured in Europe and the U.S.A. where he regularly attends SF conventions. He was a key figure in the so-called 'New Wave' of SF writers during the 1960s, alongside his friends Michael Moorcock, Harry Harrison and J. G. Ballard. His writing has greatly diversified since the conventional SF adventures of his first novels Non-Stop (1958) and Hothouse (1962), experimental fictions such as Report on Probability A (1968) and Barefoot in the Head (1969), towards philosophical and ecological concerns, notably in White Mars Or, The Mind Set Free (1999). Aldiss' futuristic fables have had a 'poetic' approach to the genre (his equivalent in American SF is Ray Bradbury), and helped move it more into the literary mainstream. He has also been an important critic and anthologist, most significantly co-writing an important history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree (1973; revised, 1986), which argued SF's origins in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, and summarised its spectacular development. His works have attracted prominent film directors: Roger Corman filmed Frankenstein Unbound in 1990, and Aldiss himself worked for years with Stanley Kubrick on an abortive screenplay from his 1969 story 'Super Toys Last All Summer Long'. This short but poignant tale of an Android boy who develops human emotions, was recently filmed by Steven Spielberg under the title A.I.

Aldiss has written fine memoirs of his life and development as a writer, in Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's (1990) and a highly revealing autobiography, In the Twinkling of an Eye (1998). This discusses with great openess his Norfolk childhood, his wartime experiences in India and Burma, and his later marital problems and spiritual crises. After the Feast (1999) is a moving memoir of his late wife, based on diaries kept during the last months of her life. Aldiss is not only a prolific author, but also a highly diverse one. His more that fifty books and hundred short stories includes much non-SF fiction, starting with The Brightfount Diaries (1955), a light-hearted look at the eccentricities of the book trade and based on his first job. His 'Horatio Stubbs' trilogy of novels began with the best-selling A Hand Reared Boy (1969), controversial at the time due to its frank sexuality; following Stubbs to manhood and national service in A Soldier Erect (1971). 'The Squire Quartet' is more pessimistic, starting with Life in the West (1980), which Anthony Burgess regarded as one of the more important post-war novels.

Many of his stories are Earth-bound and have to do with fantasy or myth, often set in contemporary Europe. This is the case in most of his ambitious collection, The Secret of This Book (1995), though Aldiss is also highly 'literary', with a penchant for pastiche, punning and allusions. Linked by authobiographical notes, the stories range from the light-hearted 'If Hamlet's Uncle had been a Nicer Guy' to the fantasy of 'Three Moon Enigmas' and 'The God Who Slept with Women', and the brutality of 'Horse Meat'. But by far his greatest stories are in the SF mode: they can be grand speculations on the subjectivity of time and space, highly inventive fables veering between cosmic optimism or pessimism - and sly humour. 'T' concerns a deadly machine moving backwards in time, its mission to destroy Earth before life begins, only to misread its map of the Solar System. Another classic early story, 'Visiting Amoeba', has the first member of a new species of mankind telling the old that their universe is over.

Aldiss himself identified the discovery of the planet Pluto in 1930 as perhaps the origin of his own childhood fascination with space. He found science fiction in pulp magazines Fantasy, Astounding Tales, and Nebula as well as in the novels of H. G. Wells, and later those of Olaf Stapledon. These influences are evident in his first successful novels, which are highly inventive if fairly conventional: Non-Stop is set aboard a decaying starship, and Hothouse is an end-of-the-world tale (it began as a magazine serial) in which the sun's increased heat and radiation has changed the Earth, giving rise to dangerous vegetation and mutated species. Human survivors Gren and his family have to decide whether to stay behind on the dying planet while 'traversers' (spider-like vegetables aided by an intelligent fungus) prepare to depart for outer space. Aldiss wrote a series of short SF novels throughout the 1960s raising implicitly political and ecological issues. In Greybeard (1964), atomic weapons testing in the atmosphere has resulted in near-total human sterility, and 'the old have inherited the earth'. The Dark Light Years (1964) is a satire in which aliens' worship of excrement places humanity's values in an ironic light. And the hero of Earthworks (1965) finds himself unwillingly part of an assassination conspiracy to start a global war - last hope of saving a pollution and garbage-engulfed planet.

Aldiss' SF contains a lot of science. He was assisted in his creation of the world of Helliconia by a number of specialists in planetary physics and biology, including James Lovelock who originated the 'Gaia' theory. The three Helliconia novels ( Spring, Summer and Winter, published 1982 to 1985), are his most complexly rewarding works, and regarded as the peak of his science fiction. Helliconia is an Earth-like planet with two suns, a thousand light years away; its dramas being observed (via spy satellite Avernus) by mass television audiences on Earth. The Helliconians - humans and fearsome Phagors - must struggle for supremacy and survival, adapting to severe climate changes as the suns wax and wane. Viruses periodically kill off half the population, but these ultimately protect the planet from colonisation and ensure human-Phagor co-dependence. The observers also change over centuries: the link between Earth and Helliconia ceases to be entertainment and becomes spiritual, as war ravages the solar system.

Aldiss' latest book, Super-State (2002), is a dark and funny satire set in a distinguished Europe, forty years hence, facing mass immigration and global warming. The daughter-in-law of the European President is abducted and falls in love with her kidnapper, an adroid taking her place at the official wedding, as the continent is threatened by war and by an imminent tidal wave. Android servants have started discussing their status, and become a health hazard. Meanwhile, the crew of the spaceship 'Roddenberry' ('a tiny needle in the lethal immaculacy of space') triumphantly find aquatic life-forms on Jupiter's moon Europa. Supply problems mean that they have to catch and eat them. As ever, Aldiss addresses a range of moral and technological questions. Science fiction itself has always been for him 'a search for a definition of man and his status in the universe'. His diverse body of work poses this

Dr Jules Smith, 2003

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Little, Brown Book Group 100, Victoria Embankment London  EC4Y 0DY England Tel: +44 (0)20 7911 8000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7911 8100 E-mail: info@littlebrown.co.uk http://www.littlebrown.co.uk

Agent Curtis Brown Group Ltd Haymarket House 28-29 Haymarket London  SW1Y 4SP England Tel: +44 (0)20 7393 4400 Fax: +44 (0)20 7393 4401 E-mail: info@curtisbrown.co.uk http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk

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