Brian Aldiss

Brian Aldiss, author of the classic Helliconia trilogy, and the story on which Steven Spielberg's 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence was based, was one of Britain's most accomplished and versatile writers of science fiction. In a lifelong and prolific career, Aldiss, who died aged 92, produced more than 40 novels and almost as many short-story collections. An ambitious and gifted writer, with a flowing and inventive literary style, he did not confine himself to science fiction. As well as his prodigious output of SF, he wrote several bestselling mainstream novels, poetry, drama, two autobiographies and several film scenarios. He also edited a huge number of anthologies and produced a body of criticism that was remarkable for its energy and clarity. He began publishing his stories in the mid-1950s, a time when SF was heavily dominated by US writers schooled in the markets of commercial magazines. Aldiss's work came as a breath of fresh air to a genre beginning to suffocate in its own orthodoxies. He wrote lively, intelligent prose, shot through with subversive humour, linguistic novelty and human observation. He took for his subjects the full range of modern scientific research. As well as the exact sciences, he also plundered speculative, psychological, sociological and sexological areas of inquiry. One of the most exhilarating aspects of reading Aldiss is the diversity of his imagination. Born in Dereham, Norfolk, he was the son of Stanley Aldiss, who came from a family that ran a draper's shop, and his wife Elizabeth, known as Dot. Brian spent much of his childhood away from his family, deposited first in Framlingham college preparatory school in Suffolk, which he hated and feared, then later, at the outbreak of the second world war, in West Buckland school in Devon, with which eventually he came to terms. In common with many who went to British boarding schools, Aldiss later said that his army experiences, crammed into sweltering troopships and trains, sleeping rough in slit trenches, and so on, were nothing compared to what he had grown up with. From 1943 he served in the Royal Corps of Signals and was shipped out to India. From there he joined the "Forgotten" 14th Army in Burma. He rose to the rank of corporal, which he described as being not as important as a general. It was probably more suited to his individualistic nature, a man who throughout his life was to lead by example, not by command. After the fall of Burma, Aldiss began training for the land assault on the Japanese mainland, but was among the many thousands of young soldiers whose lives, he was later convinced, were saved by the Japanese surrender following the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the second world war was over he continued to serve in the far east, particularly on Sumatra, an island of exotic terrain and customs, an experience that influenced much of his work, sometimes explicitly. In the 70s, Aldiss's far east sojourn informed his three Horatio Stubbs novels, which were all bestsellers: The Hand-Reared Boy (1970), A Soldier Erect (1971) and A Rude Awakening (1978). Strong autobiographical themes also ran through his best general fiction, such as Life in the West (1980) and Forgotten Life (1988), and much of his early SF was set in hot climates or jungly environments, notably Non-Stop (1958), The Male Response (1961) and Hothouse (1962). After demobilisation in 1947, Aldiss settled in Oxford and began work as a bookshop assistant. Under the pseudonym Peter Pica, he contributed a series of fictional sketches to the trade magazine The Bookseller, comically and pointedly describing the life of a bookshop assistant in a provincial town. These became enormously popular with the readership, among whom was Sir Geoffrey Faber, chairman of the publisher of that name. In this way Aldiss's first book, a collection of the sketches made up into a novel, found its publisher. The Brightfount Diaries (1955) was successful enough to allow him to quit the bookshop, which by then had become odious to him. He was to remain a Faber author for 15 years. From 1957 until 1970 he was in his spare time the literary editor of the Oxford Mail. His first SF novel was Non-Stop, about a multigeneration spaceship on a long journey between the stars. This familiar generic material gave free rein to his exuberant imagination, producing a story that not only took on the American genre on its own terms, but which introduced unmistakably British characters who were often stricken with melancholy, mischief and bursts of randiness. Non-Stop is still regarded in the SF world as a classic of its kind. In 1959, Aldiss received his first international recognition, a special Hugo award from the World Science Fiction Society for "most promising new author of the year" - no comparable Hugo has been awarded since. A few years later, he received a second Hugo, this one for Hothouse. These were what he called his SF years. Throughout the 60s he wrote a number of novels and short stories that were to cement his reputation. Prime among them was Greybeard (1964), possibly his greatest SF novel: it depicts a world of almost universal sterility, where elderly, childless survivors journey downstream along the Thames in hope of finding signs of new life. Written against the failure of his first marriage, while he was separated from his young children, this novel revealed that ebullience and exotica were not the only weapons in Aldiss's literary armoury, but that he could deal with important tragic themes. He continued to write traditional SF after that period, but in 1970 he published the first of the Horatio Stubbs novels. The second of them, A Soldier Erect, is a brilliant evocation of the far east war, and one of the few novels to be written about the Burma campaign. His career broadened. The SF became more demanding and experimental: Barefoot in the Head (1969), Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and The Malacia Tapestry (1976), a fantasy partly inspired by the drawings of the 18th-century Italian artists Tiepolo and Maggiotto, a love story set in a city where time has ceased to flow. In the early 80s, Aldiss embarked on his longest and most sustained work, the Helliconia trilogy: Helliconia Spring (1982), Summer (1983) and Winter (1985). This depiction of a world that circles a double star, where an orbital Great Year lasts long enough for cultures to emerge, prosper and fail, is a subtle, deeply researched and intellectually rigorous work. The Helliconia trilogy has earned its status as a modern classic of SF. To his friends, Aldiss was often the best of company, a generous man with a well-furnished mind who was amused not only by the follies of the world at large but also by his own. Both his autobiographies, Bury My Heart at WH Smith's (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye (1998), the former about his professional life, the latter his personal life, are full of honest and sometimes surprising self-appraisals. You sensed he was a man who never lost his curiosity, or his sense of humour. When Aldiss was on his most amusing form, a long evening in a Munich bierkeller could be memorably entertaining, as I discovered in 1987. More seriously, Aldiss's commitment to literature, and in particular to SF literature, was fierce. In the mid-60s he was instrumental in obtaining a crucial Arts Council grant for New Worlds, the pioneering British SF magazine. All his working life he did much behind the scenes to encourage, support and promote younger writers. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Literary Society in 1989, and was appointed OBE in 2005. He bore these awards, and many others, with pride. As well as the autobiographies, Aldiss produced a large number of non-fiction works. The first was a travel book, Cities and Stones (1965), a journey through the former Yugoslavia, a country he loved. Most of the rest were arguments about or critical histories of SF, but for all his industrious and often ingenious defence of the stuff in which he excelled, SF remained marginalised. It was an argument he never really won. His history of the genre, Billion Year Spree, appeared in 1973, with a recast version, Trillion Year Spree, in collaboration with David Wingrove, in 1986. Other books on SF art were published. Late in his career, Aldiss sold the film rights to one of his short stories: Supertoys Last All Summer Long (1969). Stanley Kubrick, fitful genius, was still trying to shape a script to his satisfaction when he died in 1999; Steven Spielberg took over the project, and the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) appeared two years later. Aldiss's astonishingly prolific writing continued until the end of his life. When he was 75 he was awarded the title of Grandmaster by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, obviously because of his past work, but also to celebrate the fact that he would not give up. After that he wrote more novels, two collections of poetry, and An Exile on Planet Earth (2012), a retrospective of his critical essays published by the Bodleian Library. He described Finches of Mars (2012) as his last SF novel. At some point in his few moments of spare time, he also executed some 90 original paintings - these were exhibited at the Jam Factory gallery in Oxford in 2010. Aldiss was by a long chalk the premier British science fiction writer - that he was also one of the most versatile writers of any kind was a fact that only a comparatively few readers outside the SF field came to discover. His work is still, in this sense, to be discovered. His first marriage, to Olive Fortescue in 1948, ended in divorce in 1965, after which he married Margaret Manson. She died in 1997. Aldiss was survived by his partner, Alison Soskice, and four children: Clive and Wendy from his first marriage, and Timothy and Charlotte from his second.