Brian Aldiss
Master of science fiction who used the genre to exorcise the ghosts of a traumatic childhood and hold up a mirror to modern life
BRIAN ALDISS, who has died on his 92nd birthday, was one of Britain’s leading science fiction writers, although he wrote in many other genres and was gifted in both his range and invention. Aldiss came to prominence in the 1960s alongside Kurt Vonnegut and JG Ballard as part of a new wave of science fiction writing which used its conventions to hold up a mirror to the present – a present in which the human race is threatened by its own ambitions and ingenuity.
As a writer Aldiss was extraordinarily prolific. As well as more than 40 science fiction novels and short story collections, he edited numerous anthologies, wrote a 700-page autobiography, books of travel, a three-novel series based on his own experiences of growing into manhood, a fournovel series about the last days of the Cold War, a volume of poetry, and a series of comic short stories set in a bookshop.
At its best, Aldiss’s science fiction had all the strengths of the good novel – strong storylines combined with emotional depth and psychological insight. It seemed that within the traditional plotdriven structure of science fiction, Aldiss found the metaphorical landscape to confront the demons and insecurities that had pursued him into adult life from an unhappy childhood: “When childhood dies,” he once said, “its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell.”
Brian Wilson Aldiss was born on August 18 1925 above HH Aldiss, the family department store at Dereham, Norfolk. The business had been founded by Aldiss’s grandfather, known as “the Guv’nor”, as a drapers and outfitters, doubling as an undertaker. HH Aldiss’s sons, including Brian’s father Bill, were employees, and young Brian spent his first five years living in the warren of shops, workshops and living quarters that fronted Dereham High Street.
His childhood, though, was the stuff of nightmares. His father, though basically a decent sort, had been traumatised by his experiences in the First World War and sometimes took his anger out on his young son, on one occasion holding the squalling infant out of a first floor window and threatening to drop him unless he stopped crying.
But it was his mother Elizabeth whom he blamed for inflicting the deepest emotional scars. From his earliest years she made him feel unwanted, comparing him unfavourably with an older sister, who, he was given to understand, had died at the age of six months; it was only 60 years later when he examined the parish records that he discovered that she had in fact been stillborn.
Brian was five when his younger sister Betty was born and, suffering from whooping cough, he was packed off for six weeks to stay with his grandmother in Peterborough. An acutely sensitive child, he came to believe that he had been deserted by his family in his hour of need, an impression reinforced after his return to Dereham by his mother who threatened to leave him if he would not behave.
Themes of rejection and loneliness featured frequently in his writing. In the 1960s he wrote a short story about an android boy called Supertoys Last All Summer Long. In the story, the boy does not realise he is an android, but is aware that his mother does not quite love him and is unsure why. The pathos becomes acute when she gets permission for a real pregnancy. The story was bought by Stanley Kubrick as the basis for a film, was taken over by Steven Speilberg after Kubrick’s death and released as AI: Artificial Intelligence in 2001.
Aldiss’s mother’s rejection brought on bouts of vomiting and bed-wetting, and to sort him out his parents packed him off, aged six, to the first of a series of nightmarish boarding schools where he was variously beaten, bored, starved, and sexually assaulted in the dormitory by older boys. “I felt I was being incarcerated in these places because I was a nuisance in the family”, he would recall.
Storytelling was his salvation. At prep school, he would entertain his friends with stories about Bessie, a ghost who occupied the front room in the family home in Dereham. He also discovered a talent for drawing elaborate mazes which would often wind over several sheets of paper.
In 1936, aged 11, he discovered Astounding Science Fiction, a magazine which opened a whole new imaginary landscape: “I felt that this was the real world – that it was much more important than anything I knew before.” He filled notebooks with his stories: “I warn you Aldiss”, one of his schoolmasters thundered, “if you go on like this, you’ll become another Evelyn Waugh”.
At the age of 16 he was transferred to West Buckland School, Devon, where his parents had moved after
“the Guv’nor’s” death, Brian’s father having been bought out of his share in the family business by his uncle.
There, Brian graduated to writing mild pornography to titillate the other boys and towards the end of his school career enjoyed a torrid affair in the school linen cupboard with the school matron.
He drew upon his experiences of adolescence in The Hand-reared Boy (1963), the first of the Horatio Stubbs trilogy. With its enthusiastic celebration of masturbation, the book became a succès de scandale and shot to the top of the bestseller lists.
In 1943 Aldiss signed up with the Army and trained in Norfolk and India as a signalman. He then went to Burma with Slim’s “Forgotten Army”, and though (thanks to the bombing of Hiroshima) he never fired a shot in anger, he enjoyed the comradeship. “To go from boarding school to the comparative comfort of the British army was tremendous”, he recalled.
He took part in the liberation of Mandalay and was later posted to Sumatra where British, Indian and still-armed Japanese occupiers fought side by side against Indonesian insurgents, with orders to return the islands to the Dutch. There he ran a cinema for the troops and fell in love with a Chinese woman who went to Singapore expecting him to follow. Instead he was posted to Hong Kong and never saw her again.
Aldiss’s adventures in the Far East would inspire several books including A Soldier Erect (1971) and
A Rude Awakening (1978) – the last two in the Horatio Stubbs series. They also provided him with useful imagery for his science fiction. In
Non-stop (1958), his first science fiction novel, a jungle is let loose within a starship. In Hothouse
(1964), a giant banyan tree sprawls across the world, threatening to smother humanity.
Compared with all this, post-war Britain was dreary almost beyond endurance. Unable to bear the thought of a conventional career, Aldiss found a job in Sanders booksellers in Oxford where he marked down Evelyn Waugh as the rudest of all his customers, and John Betjeman as one of the nicest and most unworldly. In 1948 he married the owner’s secretary Olive Fortescue.
Aldiss’s’ first science fiction story, Criminal Record, was published in the magazine Science
Fantasy in 1954. Other successful short stories followed, including Not for an Age (1955) which won a science fiction competition run by the Observer. The same year saw the birth of a son, and gained him his first mainstream literary success with The Brightfount Diaries, a book of comic short stories based on bookshop life. Following its publication, Aldiss was offered the post of literary editor of the Oxford Mail.
The prize money from the Observer enabled him to throw in his job at the bookshop and work from home. But the arrangement put an additional strain on an already rocky marriage. After the birth of a daughter in 1957, Aldiss walked out on his marriage.
For some years he lived a Bohemian life in a run-down part of Oxford. Lonely and yearning to see his children, he became seriously depressed. At night he would walk for miles; in the day he would sometimes find himself shoplifting boxes of Lego for his son. In Greybeard (1964) he poured out his sense of loss in a parable of England left without children after a terrible plague.
Yet the end of his first marriage marked the beginning of an illustrious literary career. Non-stop won him the accolade of Most Promising New Author of the Year from the 16th World Science Fiction Convention, and thereafter he continued to churn out bestsellers at the rate of about one a year.
During the 1960s he won two of the most important prizes for the genre: the Hugo (awarded by fans) in 1962 for Hothouse and the Nebula (awarded by other writers) in 1965 for The Saliva Tree. In 1961 he was appointed editor of the Penguin Science Fiction Series and in 1968 was voted the most popular science fiction writer by the British Science Fiction Association.
His personal life too took a turn for the better after he met Margaret Manson, secretary of the editor of the Oxford Mail, who became his second wife in 1965.
By the 1970s everything seemed to be going Aldiss’s way. Happily ensconced with Margaret and their two young children in a spacious house just outside Oxford, he had been reconciled with the children of his first marriage and his literary career continued to flourish.
But both he and Margaret had affairs and their mutual infidelities led him to have a nervous breakdown in 1974. He subsequently became very ill with chronic fatigue syndrome. His problems were compounded in 1981 when his accountant rolled up at his house one day and informed him that, owing to a miscalculation, he had been discovered to be owing huge amounts of money to the taxman. Aldiss was obliged to sell his house and his vast science fiction library to pay off his debts.
Again he found salvation through writing, embarking on the Helliconia trilogy (1982-3), a sequence set on a planet with such a wide orbit that a complete year takes 1,000 earth years while the seasons consume whole generations. The series contained vivid metaphorical landscapes of depression and was acclaimed as a masterpiece.
The books restored his fortunes, enabling him to buy another large house outside Oxford. His psychological turning point was typically bizarre “I heard a voice in the middle of the night which told me quite clearly that my mother really loved me”, he recalled. “Until then I had always been convinced that my mother didn’t love me and it had made me very insecure as a consequence”.
In the early 1990s, with their children grown up, the Aldisses sold their home to Roger Penrose (the mathematician with whom Aldiss would collaborate on White Mars, a Utopian novel published in 1999) and moved to a smaller house in Headington.
But in 1997, Aldiss suddenly developed an inexplicable phobia about finding a snake in the house; three months later, Margaret Aldiss was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died in her husband’s arms in November 1997. Devastated, Aldiss published a moving account of her death in When the Feast Is Finished (1999).
A tall, shambling, unassuming man, Aldiss had a sharp sense of humour and a disarming frankness of manner. A prominent figure on the literary scene (he served at various times on the Booker jury and on the Arts Council literary panel), he vigorously pressed the claims of science fiction as a respectable literary genre uniquely suited to the twentieth century, and wrote an acclaimed history, Billion Year Spree, in 1988.
Aldiss wrote two autobiographical memoirs, Bury My Heart at WH Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye: My Life as an Englishman (1998).
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1994, and served as chairman of the Society of Authors in 1968, president of the British Science Fiction Association from 1960 to 1964 and of World Science Fiction from 1982 to 1984. He was appointed OBE in 2005.
His last novel, Comfort Zone, published in 2013, was not a work of science fiction, but a story set in Oxford about the breakdown of a community amid controversy over a proposal to build a mosque.
Aldiss is survived by a son and daughter by his first marriage and a son and daughter by his second.
Brian Aldiss, born August 18 1925, died August 18 2017