Brian Aldiss, author of the classic Helliconia trilogy, and the story on which Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence was based, was one of Britain’s most accomplished and versatile writers of science fiction. In a lifelong and prolific career, Aldiss, who has died aged 92, produced more than 40 novels and almost as many short-story collections. An ambitious and gifted writer, with a flowing and inventive literary style, he did not confine himself to science fiction. As well as his prodigious output of SF, he wrote several bestselling mainstream novels, poetry, drama, two autobiographies and several film scenarios. He also edited a huge number of anthologies and produced a body of criticism that was remarkable for its energy and clarity.
He began publishing his stories in the mid-1950s, a time when SF was heavily dominated by US writers schooled in the markets of commercial magazines. Aldiss’s work came as a breath of fresh air to a genre beginning to suffocate in its own orthodoxies. He wrote lively, intelligent prose, shot through with subversive humour, linguistic novelty and human observation. He took for his subjects the full range of modern scientific research. As well as the exact sciences, he also plundered speculative, psychological, sociological and sexological areas of inquiry. One of the most exhilarating aspects of reading Aldiss is the diversity of his imagination.
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