Influential science-fiction writer

Born: August 18 1925

Died: August 19 2017

BRIAN Aldiss, who has died aged 92, wrote well over 50 books in a career that spanned more than six decades; he was chiefly noted as a highly influential writer and anthologist of science fiction, but also produced several volumes of poetry, travel writing, criticism and autobiography and was an accomplished visual artist.

His admirers included Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess (who included Life in the West in his survey of the best novels in English since 1939) and William Boyd, who thought him “one of our very best novelists”.

Within British science fiction he was a giant, having begun in the formulaic pulp magazine market of the 1950s and early ’60s before becoming a central figure in the “New Wave”. He secured an Arts Council grant for New Worlds, the movement’s magazine, edited by Michael Moorcock and featuring work by JG Ballard, William S Burroughs and Tom Disch alongside Aldiss’s stories.

He was an indefatigable editor and anthologist, producing Penguin Science Fiction (1961) and several sequels; The Year’s Best Science Fiction (with Harry Harrison, from 1968-1973); and Introducing SF for Faber (1964). During the 1970s he produced another half a dozen anthologies for other publishers.

Billion Year Spree (1973) was the best and most comprehensive critical history of science fiction that had then been published (it was later expanded in conjunction with David Wingrove and published as Trillion Year Spree). In the early 1980s the Helliconia trilogy imagined a world in which seasons last for many years long before Game of Thrones and reasserted his eminence in sf after several years when his fiction had become more mainstream and autobiographical. His short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long (1969) provided the basis for the film AI: Artificial Intelligence, which was developed over many years by Stanley Kubrick and eventually filmed by Steven Spielberg.

Even before the New Worlds years, Aldiss’s early work was notable for a level of invention and literary ambition unusual in the pulp-dominated science fiction of the time. At least three of his novels from the period – Non-Stop (1958), Hothouse (1962) and Greybeard (1964) – are recognised as classics. Indeed, all three are exemplary instances of the masterly handling of ideas which became popular sf themes.

Non-Stop was the story of a generation starship told from the perspective of a tribe 23 generations on from the original inhabitants who have, at first, no idea that their environment is a spaceship at all, and who later discover that they have been moored in orbit around Earth so that their society can be studied. Similar themes were tackled by later authors (notably Toby Litt’s Journey Into Space), but Aldiss’s book is still regarded as an outstanding example.

Hothouse (an expansion of his novella The Long Afternoon of Earth) was set in the distant future and again dealt with a tribe; this time, living in the branches of a huge banyan tree which spans a continent, on a world in which vegetation has taken over. Like its predecessor, it dealt with the tension between growth and entropy; though some critics found it scientifically implausible, it demonstrated Aldiss’s literary ambition and linguistic verve.

Age and decay were also the subject of Greybeard, which imagined a world in which humanity has become sterile, and in which the elderly population is facing the imminent extinction of the species; as an unflinching examination of the joys of life and the inevitability of mortality, it is superior to PD James’s The Children of Men, which tackled the same subject nearly three decades later.

Brian Wilson Aldiss was born on August 18 1925 at Dereham in Norfolk, where his father ran the family’s department store. He lived, literally, above the shop until he was sent to boarding school at Framlingham College in Suffolk and then, in 1939, to West Buckland School in Devon.

In 1943 he was conscripted and, after training, joined the Royal Corps of Signals, based in Yorkshire. The following year he was posted and eventually saw service in India, with 2nd Division in Burma, and in Assam, Sumatra, Singapore and Hong Kong; his wartime experiences provided him with much of the material for his Horatio Stubbs trilogy, which appeared between 1970 and 1978. Aldiss recently featured in an exhibition of Burma Star Association veterans photographed by his daughter Wendy.

After demob in 1947, Aldiss got a job with Sanders & Co in Oxford, where he was to live for most of his life. The following year he married Olive Fortescue, with whom he had two children; they divorced in 1965. After several years as a bookseller he began to write a column for The Bookseller; the collected pieces became his first book, The Brightfount Diaries, which was published by Faber in 1955. By that point he had also made his first science fiction sale with Criminal Record, which appeared in the July edition of Science Fantasy in 1954.

He became a full-time writer, and literary editor of the Oxford Mail, a post he held for many years, in 1956. His first short story collection, Space, Time and Nathaniel, appeared in 1957; he was eventually to write more than 300 short stories. He set up the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group with CS Lewis in 1960 and was signed up by Penguin to supervise their sf anthologies.

His first Hugo Award came in 1962, for the short stories later expanded as Hothouse. By 1965, Faber had already published The Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian W Aldiss (drawing from several collections); its more notable tales included Who Can Replace a Man?; Old Hundredth and Girl and Robot with Flowers. That year, he was Guest of Honour at the 23rd World Science Fiction Convention and married his second wife, Margaret Manson (known by him as “Moggins”), with whom he was to have a son and a daughter. With her, he visited Yugoslavia, about which he wrote the travel book Cities and Stories (1966).

Many further short story collections followed; the best are probably The Saliva Tree (1966); Intangibles Inc (1969); Last Orders (1977); Seasons in Flight (1984) and Supertoys Last All Summer Long (2001).

Aldiss’s style became progressively more literary and experimental during the late 1960s and early 1970s – Barefoot in the Head (1969) imagined a war fought with psychedelic drugs; Frankenstein Unbound (1973) featured Mary Shelley (it was filmed by Roger Corman in 1990) and The Eighty Minute Hour (1974) was a space opera in which the characters actually sing.

But the Horatio Stubbs trilogy and the Squire Quartet, about the last years of the Cold War (1980-1994, with each volume, remarkably, being brought out by a different publisher) were closer to mainstream literary novels than science fiction.

Aldiss’s return to the field with the Helliconia sequence, then, came as a surprise to many, but the novels demonstrated a mastery of sf techniques – above all, world-building – and the books were best-sellers. He served as a Booker Prize judge in 1981.

Aldiss’s output slowed a little from the 1990s, but in 1999 he produced an extraordinarily moving memoir, When The Feast is Finished, of his second wife’s illness and death. He also produced two autobiographies, Bury My Heart at WH Smith’s (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye (1998). He was appointed FRSL in 1990, and sat on the council of the Society of Authors; he became the 18th Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000, and was appointed OBE in 2005.

His last novel, Comfort Zone, not science fiction, appeared in 2013. In his later years he increasingly worked as a visual artist, and had several exhibitions. Brian Aldiss is survived by his four children.

ANDREW MCKIE