Estate of Brian Aldiss

Brian Aldiss OBE (1925-2017), was a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Brian worked as a bookseller, providing the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955).

His first published science fiction work was the story "Criminal Record", which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Faber encouraged him to pursue his enthusiasm for SF and published Space, Time and Nathaniel (1957). He went on to write nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, including the acclaimed novels Hothouse, Non-stop and the Helliconia trilogy, all regarded as modern classics.

In 2010, The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) was longlisted for the Lost Booker Prize.

Several of Brian's books, including Frankenstein Unbound, have been adapted for the cinema and his story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" was adapted and released as the film AI: Artificial Intelligence in 2001, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Besides his own writing, Brian edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories and the magazine SF Horizons.

Brian was a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA). He was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He spent much of his life in Oxford, where his bookselling career began in 1947 and where he died in 2017.

For more information about Brian Aldiss:

Website

Non-Stop

Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were - that was forgotten.

Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make a series of discoveries which turn their universe upside-down... Non-Stop is the classic science-fiction novel of discovery and exploration; a brilliant evocation of a familiar setting seen through the eyes of a primitive. 

(Overlook Press, July 2005)

Harm

From one of science fiction’s greatest living writers comes an unforgettable near-future novel in the tradition of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Orwell’s 1984, and Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Both a searing indictment of a fear-drenched political climate and a visionary allegory that shines a piercing light on timeless human verities, Harm is a powerfully compact masterwork.  

Paul Ali, a young science fiction writer of Muslim heritage, is arrested for no reason and held in isolation as prisoner B. Questioned, beaten and humiliated, he writes -- in the privacy of his mind -- a science fiction novel set on a planet in every sense a thousand light years away. Gradually, the two worlds start to converge...

(Del Rey, May 2007)

Frankenstein Unbound

Limited edition of Frankenstein Unbound with a new introduction by fellow British New Wave pioneer Michael Moorcock and art by Thomas Walker.  

(Centipede Press, March 2016)