ALDISS BELIEFS
Brian Aldiss, a former bookseller whose horrific childhood and wartime exploits in Burma kindled a fecund imagination that inspired scores of novels, anthologies, memoirs and short stories, like the one that inspired the Steven Spielberg science fiction film A.I., died on Saturday in Oxford, England, hours after celebrating his 92nd birthday.
His death was confirmed by his son Tim Aldiss.
Aldiss was celebrated largely for his science fiction, most famously the novels Nonstop (1958), Hothouse (1962), Greybeard (1964), the Helliconia trilogy (1982-85) and Frankenstein Unbound (1973), which in 1990 was the basis of the last film directed by Roger Corman.
He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick and then, after Kubrick’s death in 1999, with Spielberg in transforming Aldiss’s short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long into the emotionally challenging 2001 fairy tale A.I. about a bereft mother who consoles herself with a cybernetic son.
He also found grist in his personal life for autobiographical novels, like The Hand-reared Boy (1970), and memoirs, including The Twinkling of an Eye: My Life as an Englishman (1998).
In his memoirs Aldiss recalled his banishment when he was six to a miserable boarding school, where years of brutal bullying were redeemed, he said, by sex in a linen closet with a school matron who seduced him when he was 18.
He fictionalised a tedious job behind a bookstore counter in The Brightfount Diaries (1955) and – in a 1970s trilogy that revolved around his alter ego, Horatio Stubbs, and began with The Hand-reared Boy – his escapades as a 19-year-old enlistee in the Second World War during which he never saw a Japanese soldier but visited a steamy bordello.
Animated as a child by witnessing an eclipse and discovering the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, he devoured novels by H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein and later Philip K Dick (although he said Tolstoy’s Resurrection was his favourite novel). In all, Aldiss eventually churned out more than 80 books, more than 300 short stories and several volumes of poetry.
“Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can,” he once said. “Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.”
He defined science fiction formulaically, as he explained to Locus magazine in 2000: “The world’s in some sort of a state, and something awful happens. It may not be evil, it may be good or neutral, just an accident. Whatever they do in the novel, at the end the world is changed forever.”
His fantasies were imbued with descriptive detail and what a character in his 1988 book Forgotten Life (a suicidal giant sloth who collects folk music) celebrated as “the simple and intricate feeling of being alive.”
Eternally alive, in the case of an uncomprehending 16thcentury Englishman in Aldiss’s 1957 short story Let’s Be Frank. The character is endowed with a chromosome that turns his progeny into his persona. (Aldiss would have four children of his own.)
“As long as the chromosome reproduced itself in sufficient dominance, he was immortal!” Aldiss wrote. “To him, in an unscientific age, the problem did not present itself quite like that; but he realised that there was a trait to be kept in the family.”
Brian Wilson Aldiss was born on 18 August, 1925, in Dereham, a town in Norfolk, to Bill Aldiss and the former Elizabeth Wilson.
His father, who ran a drapery store that he had inherited and that the Aldisses lived above, wasashellshockedfirstworld War veteran who once threatened to drop Brian out a window when he was an infant unless he stopped crying.
Brian was constantly compared with an idolised older sister whom his mother said had died when she was six months old but who, he later learned, had been stillborn.
To escape, he wrote – first to distract his younger sister, he said, then to disarm his schoolmates. He would read his stories to them to stave off their bullying and sexual abuse.
Afterhewasdischargedfrom the British Army as a signalman, Aldiss worked at a bookstore in Oxford and married the owner’s secretary, Olive Fortescue. Their marriage ended in divorce several years after he had left his family. A second wife, the former Margaret Manson, died in 1997.
He is survived by two children from his first marriage, Clive and Wendy Aldiss; two from his second marriage, Tim Aldiss and Charlotte Randall; eight grandchildren; and his partner, Alison Soskice.
Once he left the bookstore to write full time, Aldiss turned out the Helliconia trilogy, about a planet where a day lasts a millennium, and Greybeard, about a world without children after the detonation of nuclear weapons – what is referred to as “The Accident” – renders humans sterile.
Aldiss, along with JG Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut and others, was in the vanguard of writers who invoked science fiction to fathom a modern world that humans for the first time were empowered to destroy.
“I don’t agree with those people who think of science fiction as some kind of prediction of the future,” he told BBC Radio in 2007. “I think it’s a metaphor for the human condition.”
Aldiss won the two most prestigious awards for science fiction writing, the Hugo and the Nebula, and was named a grandmaster by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
He was also appointed an Officer of the British Empire but he believed that science fiction was more popular in the United States.
“Readers there are less stupid about science fiction,” he told the Telegraph in 2015. “Americans understand that while it may take place in an alternate or future world, it deals with the present.”
He acknowledged that modern technological advances had made writing science fiction more challenging. His last novel, Comfort Zone (2013), was about a controversy over a proposed mosque that divides contemporary Oxford.
“Those of us who managed to survive the Second World War and the Cold War,” Aldiss said in 2001, “sense the future has already arrived.” © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects. Please contact: Gazette Editor n The Scotsman, Level 7, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh EH4 2HS; n gazette@scotsman.com
“I don’t agree with those people who think of science fiction as somekindofprediction of the future. I think it’s a metaphor for the human condition”