Brian W. Aldiss
Brian W. Aldiss was a prominent British writer, renowned primarily for his contributions to science fiction, though his literary output extended across various genres, including travel literature, short stories, autobiographical works, and literary criticism. Born in 1925 in East Dereham, England, Aldiss developed an early interest in American pulp magazines, which laid the groundwork for his future writing career. His experiences in the British Army during World War II, especially in Southeast Asia, deeply influenced his thematic focus on isolation and human relationships in his narratives.
Aldiss's notable works include the science fiction trilogy *Helliconia*, which showcases his world-building skills, and novels like *Non-Stop* and *Barefoot in the Head*, where he examines human emotions and societal issues. Beyond science fiction, he also explored sexuality and personal growth in his mainstream novels, particularly in the series featuring the character Horatio Stubbs. Throughout his career, Aldiss received numerous accolades, including being named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. He passed away in Oxford in 2017, leaving behind a diverse body of work that continues to engage readers and inspire writers within the literary world.
Brian W. Aldiss
- Born: August 18, 1925
- Birthplace: East Dereham, Norfolk, England
- Died: August 19, 2017
- Place of death: Oxford, England
English novelist and short-story writer
Biography
Although British writer Brian Wilson Aldiss was best known as the creator of popular science fiction, his list of work encompassed many more interests. His chief concern was with the exploration of human nature, either as he observed it around him or as he extrapolated what it would or should be in an imagined fictive place and time. In addition, he produced volumes of travel literature, short stories, autobiography, and art and literary criticism. No matter the form or genre, Aldiss was intent on examining what makes people tick.
Aldiss was born in 1925 to Stanley and Elizabeth May Wilson Aldiss. He spent his early childhood in East Dereham, England, and was sent away to boarding school at the age of eight. His father later moved the family to Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk, where, Aldiss observes, he first made an acquaintance with American pulp magazines and science fiction. After leaving school in 1943, Aldiss joined the British Army and was stationed in Southeast Asia, an experience which he believed had a lasting impact on his life and writing, especially in his use of lush tropical settings and in his exploration of the themes of isolation and exile.
Aldiss returned home from the war in 1947 and went to work as an assistant in an Oxford bookshop, submitting his first piece of fiction to John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction and beginning work on a still-unpublished novel. His first piece of published writing ran serially for two years as “The Brightfount Diaries” in the magazine Bookseller under the pseudonym Peter Pica. In 1955, Faber and Faber published the collected pieces as a novel under Aldiss’s name. In 1957, Aldiss went to work as literary editor for the Oxford Mail. He also published short stories and worked on Non-Stop, which appeared in 1958. This novel, like many that followed, explores the issue of isolation; it tells the story of a failed interstellar mission whose vessel circles Earth.
One feature of Aldiss’s science fiction and fantasy that makes it unlike the work of many other writers in the genre is that he places considerable emphasis on the nature of human feeling and relationships. Aldiss explored these issues in such science-fiction and fantasy novels as The Dark Light Years, a book that examines the implications of humans’ first encounter with aliens; Barefoot in the Head, in which the madness brought about by a bombing of Europe with psychedelic gases is reflected in deformations of language; and The Malacia Tapestry, a sword-and-sorcery tale of a world caught up in the battle between good and evil magicians. Aldiss’s science fiction often engaged in conscious dialogue with other writers. Frankenstein Unbound and Dracula Unbound revisit two of the works Aldiss considers most significant in the history of the field. The Saliva Tree and Moreau’s Other Island reply to H. G. Wells. Stepping outside the genre, Aldiss adapts Alain Robbe-Grillet’s multiple levels of observation to a science-fictional story in Report on Probability A and uses the “Eurish” of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to reflect the psychological and linguistic chaos of Barefoot in the Head.
Aldiss’s masterwork, in the old sense of a work which shows his mastery of all elements of the field, is the trilogy comprising Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, and Helliconia Winter. Here Aldiss creates a new planet, complete with unusual climate and sentient and other life-forms, peoples it richly with characters, and even has it observed by Earth through the same sort of multiple levels of narration he used in Report on Probability A.
Besides writing science fiction and fantasy, however, Aldiss was equally at home in novels of the everyday. Much of his mainstream fiction deals with sexuality, often exploring individual preferences from a comic perspective. Two of his early novels, The Male Response and The Primal Urge, fall into this category. More important is his series chronicling the sexual exploits and maturation of Horatio Stubbs: The Hand-Reared Boy, which traces the hero’s adolescent adventure, and its sequels, A Soldier Erect and A Rude Awakening. Because of the relatively conservative temper of the time during which these books were written, and their blatant treatment of their protagonist’s sexual fantasies and adventures, Aldiss initially encountered some difficulties in getting a publisher to accept them, but they were favorably received and became best-sellers in Great Britain. Aldiss’s mainstream novels often relied on his own life experiences for their themes, as in the case of Forgotten Life, which portrays the lives of two brothers, Clement and Joseph Winter, whose combined careers closely parallel Aldiss’s own.
In addition to his novels of real and otherworldly adventures, Aldiss produced many volumes of short stories that take up the same issues as his longer fiction, including what many critics believe to be his best, The Moment of Eclipse, which won for Aldiss the British Science Fiction Association Award. In this volume, Aldiss takes his themes and inspiration from such authors as Thomas Hardy and Edgar Allan Poe and from the painter Antoine Watteau.
Aldiss also wrote a history of science-fiction literature, originally published as Billion Year Spree and later updated with coauthor David Wingrove as Trillion Year Spree. This study provides readers with an entertaining and informative chronicle of the genre Aldiss knew best and gives thorough and useful background for those interested in learning about the roots of contemporary science fiction. Finally, Aldiss published poetry, travel literature, and essays, and served as the editor for collections of science-fiction and fantasy short stories. His prodigious and varied output offers readers the opportunity to enjoy his capable storytelling without feeling as though they are simply covering familiar territory one more time. He won numerous awards over the course of his long career, and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for his services to literature. He died in Oxford on August 19, 2017.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
The Brightfount Diaries, 1955
Non-Stop, 1958 (revised as Starship, 1959)
Equator, 1958 (also known as Vanguard from Alpha)
Bow Down to Nul, 1960 (also known as The Interpreter)
The Male Response, 1961
The Primal Urge, 1961
Hothouse, 1962 (also known as Long Afternoon of Earth)
The Dark Light Years, 1964
Greybeard, 1964
Earthworks, 1965
An Age, 1967 (also known as Cryptozoic! )
Report on Probability A, 1968
Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia, 1969
The Hand-Reared Boy, 1970
A Soldier Erect, 1971
Frankenstein Unbound, 1973
The Eighty-Minute Hour, 1974
The Malacia Tapestry, 1976
Brothers of the Head, and Where the Lines Converge, 1977
A Rude Awakening, 1978
Enemies of the System, 1978
Life in the West, 1980
Moreau’s Other Island, 1980 (also known as An Island Called Moreau)
Helliconia Spring, 1982
Helliconia Summer, 1983
Helliconia Winter, 1985
The Year Before Yesterday: A Novel in Three Acts, 1987
Ruins, 1988
Forgotten Life, 1988
Dracula Unbound, 1991
Remembrance Day, 1993
Somewhere East of Life, 1994
White Mars: Or, The Mind Set Free, a Twenty-first Century Utopia, 1999
The Cretan Teat, 2001
Super-state: A Novel of a Future Europe, 2002
Affairs at Hampden Ferrers, 2004
Jocasta, 2004
Sanity and the Lady, 2005
HARM, 2007
Walcot, 2009
Finches of Mars, 2012
Comfort Zone, 2013
Short Fiction:
Space, Time, and Nathaniel: Presciences, 1957
The Canopy of Time, 1959 (rev. as Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, 1960)
No Time Like Tomorrow, 1959
The Airs of Earth, 1963 (revised as Starman, 1964)
Best Science-Fiction of Brian W. Aldiss, 1965 (also known as Who Can Replace a Man?)
The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths, 1966
Intangibles Inc., and Other Stories, 1969 (revised as Neanderthal Planet, 1969)
The Moment of Eclipse, 1970
The Book of Brian Aldiss, 1972 (also known as Comic Inferno)
Excommunication, 1975
Last Orders, and Other Stories, 1977
New Arrivals, Old Encounters: Twelve Stories, 1979
Foreign Bodies, 1981
Seasons in Flight, 1984
A Romance of the Equator: Best Fantasy Stories, 1989
A Tupolev Too Far, and Other Stories, 1994
The Secret of This Book: Twenty-Odd Stories, 1995 (pb. in U.S. as Common Clay: Twenty-Odd Stories, 1996)
Supertoys Last All Summer Long, and Other Stories of Future Time, 2001
Cultural Breaks, 2005
50 x 50: The Mini-Sagas, 2012
The Invention of Happiness, 2013
Drama:
Distant Encounters, pb. 1978
Poetry:
Pile: Petals from St. Klaed’s Computer, 1979
Farewell to a Child, 1982
At the Caligula Hotel, and Other Poems, 1995
A Prehistory of Mind, 2008
Mortal Morning, 2011
Songs from the Steppes, 2014
Nonfiction:
Cities and Stones: A Traveller’s Yugoslavia, 1966
The Shape of Further Things: Speculations on Change, 1970
Billion Year
Spree: The History of Science Fiction, 1973
Science Fiction Art, 1975
Science Fiction as Science Fiction, 1978
This World and Nearer Ones: Essays Exploring the Familiar, 1979
Science Fiction Quiz, 1983
The Pale Shadow of Science, 1985
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, 1986, revised 2001 (with David Wingrove)
Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s, 1990
The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy, 1995
The Twinkling of an Eye: Or, My Life as an Englishman, 1998
When the Feast Is Finished, 1999 (with Margaret Aldiss)
The Starry Messenger: Visions of the Universe, 2006
An Exile on Planet Earth: Articles and Reflections, 2012
Collected Essays, 2013
In the Twinkling of an Eye, 2015
Bibliography
Aldiss, Margaret. The Work of Brian W. Aldiss: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide. Edited by Boden Clarke. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1992.
Collings, Michael R. Brian W. Aldiss. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1987.
Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British “New Wave” in Science Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Griffin, Brian, and David Wingrove. Apertures: A Study of the Writings of Brian W. Aldiss. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.
Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001.
Henighan, Tom. Brian W. Aldiss. New York: Twayne, 1999.
Mathews, Richard. Aldiss Unbound: The Science Fiction of Brian W. Aldiss. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977.
Platt, Charles. Dream Makers: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers at Work. Rev. ed. New York: Ungar, 1987.
Priest, Christopher. "Brian Aldiss Obituary." The Guardian, 21 Aug. 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/21/brian-aldiss-obituary. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.