Brian W. Aldiss

Brian Wilson Aldiss (18 August 1925 in Dereham, Norfolk - 19 August 2017 in Oxford) was an English science fiction writer. He was one of the main representatives of the so-called New Wave of British science fiction.

Biography

Aldiss was born in East Dereham, in Norfolk County. After finishing primary school in 1943, he did military service in Burma and Sumatra, where he remained until the end of World War II. In 1948 he returned to Oxford and began working as a bookseller, until, in 1955, he won first prize in the contest organized by the English newspaper The Observer with the story Not for an Age . However, before winning the prize he had managed to get some stories published, such as in The Bookseller magazine, and already in 1954 he published a story in Science Fantasy Magazine.

His start as a professional writer, however, must be placed in the year 1958 with the publication of Non-Stop (in Spanish La nave estelar; also published as Journey to Infinity by the NEBULAE collection). His success in the United States came in 1958 with the story Judas Dancing , winning the following year a special mention in the Hugo Award as a new author. In 1962 he won the prize in the short story category of the same contest with Invernáculo .

Since then he published When Earth is Dead, Greybeard, The Dark Light Years and Earthworks (1965), which earned him the respect of the public and critics for his style and his elaborate narrative.

After Michael Moorcock became the editor of New Worlds magazine and supported a substantial shift in the science fiction publishing landscape towards the New Wave, Aldiss began an intense collaborative work with the author J.G. Ballard.

In 1967 he published Criptozoico and a year later Informe sobre Probabilidad A, in which he began to experiment with stylistic devices with diverse results. In 1969 he published A barefoot head , a complex work reminiscent of James Joyce and with which he broke some of the limits of science fiction published up to now. The work is also reminiscent of the novel The Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs. The conflict from which the plot of the work starts is the conflict between Yugoslavia and some Arab and Middle Eastern nations after a war that takes place on French territory.

This difficult literature caused a decline in sales and in the reception of his works by the public, which led him to withdraw from the literary scene for a time. In the early 1970s he reunited with the mainstream and wrote a trilogy on youth problems, only the first volume of which reached top sales charts. In 1973 he published his Frankenstein Unchained , considered by many to be his weakest work, based on the work of Mary Shelley, many critics considered it a quasi-plagiarism . Along the same lines, he published The Other Island of Doctor Moureau , based on Wells's work.

After some other minor science fiction novels, Aldiss wrote and published in 1981 his Heliconia series, which concluded in 1985. This work described a world in a two-star system along of centuries. The main theme is the rise and fall of civilizations over the seasons. It clearly points to the Hegelian concept of the historical dialectic.

The topicality of strange plots that are far from conventional patterns was revealed in the filming of the film Artificial Intelligence (A.I., 2001) by Steven Spielberg from from a script by Stanley Kubrick, who, in turn, was based on Aldiss's narration Supertoys Last All Summer Long, 1969.

She passed away on August 19, 2017 after celebrating her 92nd birthday with her closest friends and family.

Accommodations

• The Resurrection of Frankenstein (1990), film directed by Roger Corman, based on the novel Frankenstein triggered
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long"
• Brothers of the Head (2005), film directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, based on the novel Brothers of the Head

Awards

• Hugo to the best short fiction work of 1962 by the series of stories Winter
• Nebula to the best short novel of 1965 by The tree of the saliva
• John W. Campbell 1982 Memorial by Heliconia: Spring
• British SF Association Award 1982