Aldiss, Brian W. (1925- ) science fiction novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer

Brian Aldiss was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, England, to department store owner Stanley Ald- iss and his wife, Elizabeth. He was a soldier, poet, film critic, and bookseller before becoming a fulltime writer.

Among Aldiss’s noteworthy science fiction novels are Barefoot in the Head (1969), about a future war whose weapons are psychedelic drugs; and Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983), and Helliconia Winter (1985), a trilogy that traces the history of a society on a planet with centuries-long seasons. Among his other novels, the semiautobiographical The Hand-Reared Boy (1970), A Soldier Erect (1971), and A Rude Awakening (1978) follow a character named Horatio Stubbs through school and war.

Aldiss has also retold the Dracula, Dr. Moreau, and Frankenstein stories. His Frankenstein Unbound (1973) was turned into a 1990 film, and his short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” (1969) was filmed as A.I. (2001). The former concerns a time traveler meeting both Victor Frankenstein and Mary Shelley, while the latter tells of a lifelike robot boy whose “parents” debate whether to get rid of him as if he were merely an appliance, though he clearly is a sentient being.

Aldiss’s history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree (1973), treats the genre with serious critical scrutiny instead of the usual fan recollections. He argues that science fiction was born in the 19th century when the mystery and suspense of the gothic romance was wedded to the scientific and technological wonders of the Industrial Revolution. For Aldiss, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the first true science fiction novel. He adds that “ [t]he greatest successes of science fiction are those which deal with man in relation to his changing surroundings and abilities: what loosely might be called environmental fiction.” Although Aldiss’s work employs familiar science fiction elements, such as robots, lasers, and spaceships, he places a high value on philosophical and sociological questions, as in the Helliconia books’ examination of how a culture adapts to its physical environment.

In 1962 Aldiss won a Hugo, the Science Fiction Achievement Award, for Hothouse (1962), a collection of stories about humans of the far future living in a huge tree that covers a continent. Three years later his “The Saliva Tree,” in which H. G. Wells foils an alien takeover, won a Nebula Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 1999 that group proclaimed him a “Grand Master.” Biographer Tom Henighan credits Aldiss with “a history of science fiction that at one stroke demolished nearly half a century’s parochial reading of the genre.”

A Work about Brian Aldiss:
Henighan, Tom. Brian Aldiss. Boston: Twayne, 1999.