rian W. Aldiss is one of the living legends of British SF. Born in 1925, and a longtime resident of Oxford, he began publishing short stories in the mid-1950s, and within a few years had embarked on the succession of SF novels that would make him famous. Strongly associated with the U.K.'s New Wave of the 1960s, and a radical literary experimenter ever since, Aldiss remains a highly distinctive voice in SF and without, a fine stylist, an ambitious, audaciously inventive speculative thinker, a powerful moral commentator and a brilliant raconteur in prose. He is, in addition, one of the foremost historians of science fiction.
Any exhaustive listing of Aldiss' works would go on forever; his books of major note are numerous enough. Important novels are Non-Stop (1958), Hothouse (1962), Greybeard (1964), Cryptozoic (1967), Report on Probability A (1968), Barefoot in the Head (1969), Frankenstein Unbound (1973), The Malacia Tapestry (1976), Moreau's Other Island (1980), the Helliconia trilogy (Helliconia Spring, 1982; Helliconia Summer 1983; and Helliconia Winter, 1985), Dracula Unbound (1991), Somewhere East of Life (1994), White Mars (1999, with Roger Penrose), Super-State (2002) and, just published, Affairs at Hampden Ferrers. Key short story collections are Space, Time and Nathaniel (1957), Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (1960), The Saliva Tree (1966), Last Orders (1977), A Tupolev Too Far (1993) and The Secret of This Book (1995). Aldiss' history of SF, Trillion Year Spree (1986, with David Wingrove), his critical and autobiographical works (such as the excellent memoir The Twinkling of an Eye, 1998) and his "mainstream" realist novels are also of great interest. A wide selection of the above and other titles is available from the U.K.-based print-on-demand publisher House of Stratus.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Brian Aldiss by e-mail in July 2004.
You recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of your first short story. Looking back over your extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre, what seem to you now to be the greatest highlights? Of which of your books are you the most proud?
Aldiss: I am proud of having written one book: When the Feast Is Finished (1999). It's the story of my wife Margaret's death and life, and of our love and our delightful family. In a period of misery, I was happy to create this modest memorial to her.
For the rest—well, proud? Relieved, sorry, shagged out ... Not exactly proud: because one always feels, when the thing is completed, that perhaps one might have been better, have phrased it better, have tried harder—for instance, with the shaping of individual sentences. And with SF there is always the danger of talking out of the back of one's hat. Bring in magic and you're sunk. ...
Of course, I was glad that Hothouse was so successful, though I worried that it was about little people. Oh, I was pretty pleased with Report on Probability A, because that did turn out much as I had intended it. And there's Forgotten Life (1988).
And how I laughed when writing Cretan Teat (2002)!—I believe House of Stratus have sort of published it.
Something that runs through a lot of your fiction—SF, mainstream, works in between—is a highly knowledgeable, frequently caustic but also quite affectionate commentary on English society, its inequalities and its eccentricities. In balance, what's your estimation of England these days, as it was and as it is?
Aldiss: Yes, I'm knowledgeable, or at least knowledgeable enough to realize how little I know. The threat of havoc and destruction from outside the boundaries of the Western world has sharpened my appreciation of the benefits we enjoy here and mainly take for granted.
Here's one example of our good fortune: Vienna airport. Supposing you arrive there even from Macedonia, a pleasant enough country, you are struck by the beauty and organization of the airport. Elegant people sit about in open spaces sipping good coffee, talking, laughing. The shops are beautiful, stocked with enticing goods. People are polite. Everything works smoothly. And not just for the day you go through. For every day. For year after year. The West flourishes because its denizens are prepared to work and to sustain what they have started.
I deeply love England, annoying though it often may be. Certainly it has improved since I was a lad: not just in its many scientific advances but in the freedom of relationships between people—at least in certain sectors of society.
Some sense of optimism, then, even of utopianism; and yet, unlike technophilic American SF writers, you often do appear to express a relatively fatalistic philosophy of the human future. In this century of global warming and the growing conflict of rich and poor, how hopeful are you of the human race's longer-term prosperity and survival?
Aldiss: Looking at the world situation, you see reasons for hope, reasons for despair. I like despair; it's so cleansing. Makes for better prose. Loved The Day After Tomorrow. The world going to hell in a bucket. But in many ways one can see improvement. The 20th century was a period of phenomenal growth. You could not doubt that if you were a woman looking back—or a man looking forward.
I guess we'll stay afloat until the next big meteor strike.
At the same time as you've captured England so precisely, you've often exhibited a flamboyant exoticism, as in Hothouse, The Malacia Tapestry and Helliconia. Names such as Hanra TolramKetinet, Itsobeshiquetzilaha, locations such as continent-spanning banyan trees, the moon caught in spiders' webs, alternate Byzantiums, a world whose seasons span centuries ... Whence does all this color emanate? You did serve in the British army in Southeast Asia, of course, and you're widely traveled. ...
Aldiss: Impossible to say where the exoticism comes from. It has always been a part of me. Of course I did see the banyan tree in Calcutta Botanical Gardens—"the world's biggest tree"—forever spreading outwards. I have no doubt that the four-year exile in the Far East helped imagination along. I still have a passionate nostalgia—not for East Dereham, Norfolk, where I was born, but for the Sumatra in which I lived for a year after World War II. Medan, the capital: broken down, semi-functional, quiet, dangerous, exotic, with no currency but at least one adorable woman living there.
[Malacia is based on Ragusa, modern Dubrovnik.]
I've always savored your writing style, its periodic opulence, its poetry, its mixture of elegance and bracing abruptness. Who were your formative literary influences, and how would you assess your stylistic development since the 1950s?
Aldiss: "Periodic opulence"! That's good. The style developed from extensive reading, things that later were seen as pretty trashy, as well as standard "good books." Certainly that taste for the exotic, a prize example being Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps, wonderfully translated into an English prose like clotted cream, so that you are always aware of its foreign origin. A novel I wish I had been able to write. Also Lesley Blanche's Sabres of Paradise—a book as thick with flavor as roast wild boar, tusks and all. One of the most nutritious books I ever read. Blanche is still alive at 101, living in the South of France. Of course.
Stylistic development: You certainly get more choosy over a long lifetime. Doris Lessing (Shikasta, etc.) has been good for me—why should not an ordinary novel shade gently into science-fictional mode? As happened with Somewhere East of Life (a novel I still quite like, not least for non-literary reasons—it took me to Turkmenistan).
After working with Stanley Kubrick on A.I., with the coming of a new century, I wished to attempt new ways of telling a story. With Super-State (2002), I tried to abolish narrative, or to subsume it into episodes. Those episodes, standing apart, had to be crisp and punchy. I will never forgive Little Brown for their carelessness in publishing and promulgating that novel, which should have had a wide audience.
I liked the difficulties involved in the writing and shaping of Super-State, so I tried again on a more narrow scale. Hampden Ferrers is the story of one fictitious Oxfordshire village and its inhabitants. The horseplay, the surrealism and the romances sugar a pill of debate about the nature of the universe. Is it SF or not? Well, plainly not. And yet ... You think I care which it is? I believe I made it both, probably to no one's satisfaction but my own.
Then I zoomed in still further. Sanity and the Lady (coming from Peter Crowther's PS Publishing) is about one family and one brave lady in particular. It certainly ain't trad SF. It's what I do.
Trying new styles and themes helps one keep fresh and on one's toes.
Your recent novels, as you say, can usually be read as either mainstream or as SF/fantasy; and one might apply a similar observation to earlier work. ... So genres and publishing categories don't really apply in your writing?
Aldiss: I don't know the answer to this question. I only know that mine is not the path to riches or fame. I have schooled myself not to seek that illusion, Fame. This is the day of the Celeb! My popularity was in the '60s and '70s, when I cared not what I wrote. Although of course I miss it a bit, I rejoice that my creative juices still function, that words still flow, that my garden still blossoms, that my TV still has an off switch, that my lover has the wonderful power of a woman to challenge and enchant.
You became well known very early on for your magnificent short stories—fine collections such as Space, Time, and Nathaniel, individual gems like "Old Hundredth"; and you've remained reasonably prolific at short lengths ever since. What, for you, are the especial virtues of the SF short story? Why have you remained so strongly committed to the short form?
Aldiss: Don't forget I began my writerly life as champion story-teller in the darkened dormitories of various low-grade public schools. I told stories and the kids all listened. Short stories sort of emerge. You can be in the middle of writing a novel and a turn of phrase, let's say, awakens a side issue. You park the novel in a side street and tell yourself the story.
In the '70s, I would set myself exercises: Scribble down six or so random phrases. "A cloud shaped like a piano, a piano shaped like a cloud." "How's the rapture, honey?" "All those enduring old charms." Eventually they served as ingredients—or at least diving boards—for the stories in Last Orders. Maybe I was a leetle mad then.
Maybe I'm not an SF writer at all. Maybe I'm a surrealist.
A number of your early novels—Non-Stop, The Dark Light Years (1964)—are space operas, of an innovative, unconventional sort; later on, you edited a number of major space opera anthologies. Now, of course, space opera dominates British SF. What's the charm of this once despised subgenre, the cause of its experimental fecundity? Why do you think it's so popular now?
Aldiss: I don't know. Maybe it's popular because you can churn it out by the yard, if you abandon your mind to it. (Sorry, all concerned!)
Of course, you, J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock were in a real sense the ABC (or ABM) of the British New Wave in the '60s and early '70s. Appraising the New Wave now, what were its major achievements, generally and for you personally?
Aldiss: What did Mike Moorcock overthrow when he took over New Worlds magazine? He threw out a wadge of remarkably dreary second-rate writing. The stories were largely secondhand, written in imitation of the American style and mere shadows of Bester, Blish, Simak et al. Not to mean to be rude, but amateur fan writing. Under Mike, the writing was much fresher. A whole new audience, an audience with intellect (those who weren't drugged out). Conventions changed sharply from one year to the next; suddenly there were folk you wanted to know. Never forget our debt to Mike. One no longer felt ashamed to be writing SF. Good old Mike—he almost killed himself doing what he did.
In the '70s, you wrote Frankenstein Unbound, an apocalyptic homage to Mary Shelley's masterpiece, and Billion Year Spree (1973), which argued the case for Frankenstein as the first genuine SF novel. Do you hold to your expressed view then, that SF is cast predominantly in the Gothic mode?
Aldiss: The popular "page-turner," with something awful always about to happen, is a Gothic invention. Mary Shelley's wonderful novel bears the influence of her father's writing—the William Godwin who wrote Caleb Williams. This month (July) I was in Kansas to receive a posthumous award for Mary Shelley. So I guess my argument that Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus is the first scientific romance is winning the day. How come more English readers never supported my choice? The case is thoroughly argued in Billion and Trillion Year Spree.
Taking up that last matter: In the '80s, you and David Wingrove expanded Billion Year Spree into the updated Trillion Year Spree. Is Quadrillion Year Spree even a vague possibility, here in the Noughts?
Aldiss: There is a slightly revised edition of Trillion available from House of Stratus as a print-on-demand book. It's big, with 340 pages. But Quadrillion? Forget it!—Me, I'm resting on my oars.
Your exceptional '70s novel of the fantastic was The Malacia Tapestry: baroque, teeming with life, and yet above all a study of decadence, of artificial cultural stasis. How did your vision of Malacia first coalesce, and subsequently evolve? Are you still tempted to write the mooted sequel?
Aldiss: Baroque, yes, that's what Malacia is. Some silly little person said of it that it had no ideas; in fact, I felt that Britain at that time had kind of seized up and would not move forward—was stuck in its past—and I intended Malacia as an extended metaphor. But more than that I marveled at, worshipped at, G.B. Tiepolo's little capriccii and scherzii. Etchings of a mysterious world of sacrifice and devil worship and living folk dug from the ground and serpents burning on sinful altars and all that mumbo-jumbo he depicted so beautifully. This was an artist who had painted acres of beautiful ceilings all over Europe. Did you ever view his masterpiece in the Residenz in Wurzburg? He retired to Venice in his old age and executed these little postcard-sized portraits of a strange, sumptuous world. That was what I desired to write about, curlicues and all.
No sequels, though. Never look back—as I am doing here.
Your Helliconia trilogy of the early to mid-'80s remains a resounding accomplishment, one of the greatest of SF's planetary romances. What a vast tapestry you painted! How difficult did you find writing such a massive serial epic? And was the trilogy in some ways your farewell to large-scale SF, your Final Word on SF as a wide-screen genre?
Aldiss: I wanted Helliconia to stand as a massif central of the scientific romance. I saw the flood of Tolkien imitations lapping like a poisonous sea at the grounds of what I regarded as the old SF, the straight flat-diction SF presided over by John Campbell in the heyday of Astounding. ... The vast tapestry was a requirement of the extended Great Year of Helliconia. I was ill at the time, suffering from what was known as PVFS (Post-Viral Fatigue Syndrome). The novels were written during the brief epoch of the electronic typewriter; you could not pick up the phone while typing was going on in case the guy at the other end thought revolution had broken out in Oxford, and headed madly for the mountains.
After two years of research, I began to write, to fill my canvas with humans and phagors and god knows what else. Beauty and terror, love and pathos and stupidity. It was creative freedom.
You ask if it was my farewell to something. I guess so. And my hello to something else ...
Your interest in Greek myth seems to be coming to the fore in new and upcoming work (The Cretan Teat, et cetera.) Why is this? Are these historical novels, or something else entirely?
Aldiss: Probably something else entirely, as you put it. My dear son, Clive, and his Greek wife, Youla, live in Athens. Naturally, I tend to gravitate there. Following after Cretan Teat comes Jocasta, due to appear from the Rose Press in a limited edition this September. I have also written a grand opera, Oedipus on Mars, really the grandson of Jocasta, for which the music is now being composed.
What other projects lie ahead for you? You seem as prolific as ever ...
Aldiss: A collection of new short stories will appear from Tachyon Publications in the States. Title, Cultural Breaks. My French connection is still strong. I am working on the start of a penultimate revision of my not-quite-finished novel, Walcot. It's an over-ambitious story of a slightly dysfunctional family through the 20th century. Maybe it's OK. Maybe it's a flop. Maybe it's great. How exciting not to know! But worth trying anyway. And I think there's a spark, or I'd hardly bother to go on. A few short stories for light relief. Lectures. Interruptions like this interview ...
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