Interview about Brian Aldiss 2

 Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Paul Kincaid (July 2024)

Paul Kincaid’s book on Brian Aldiss, part of the Modern Master of Science Fiction series was

published in 2022. His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including New

Scientist, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, New York Review of Science Fiction,

Foundation, Science Fiction Studies, Interzone and Strange Horizons. He is a former editor of

Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.

Damo Mac Choiligh: The Helliconia trilogy is widely regarded as one of Aldiss’s greatest works and some, in other words me, regard it as one of the greatest works in all of SF. Would you agree with that statement, do you personally hold it in such high regard? And was Aldiss himself satisfied with its scope and direction?

PK: To be honest, no, I don’t think it is one of his best works, though it is certainly one of his most ambitious. I think he was at his best with works that had a tight focus. He was an experimentalist by nature, constantly trying out new ideas. That’s why he wrote so many short stories, they gave him a chance to experiment with what he was writing. The idea of writing a big multigenerational work with an environmental focus was another experiment, of course, but I think it got away from him. The change between the second and third volumes: the much shorter book, the way the whole thing revolves around just one character, the limited geographical range, not to mention the fact that there was a much longer gap between two and three than there had been between one and two, all suggest to me that he was rethinking the trilogy at that point. I suspect he felt it hadn’t worked as well as he had expected (he practically says as much in a comment addressed to his son when he says, ironically, that the better the book the worse the sales), and so Winter, my favourite of the three, was just the quickest way he could get out of the contract. The later Squire sequence had a somewhat similar range, but a much tighter focus.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Do you think it’s right to think of Hothouse as a forerunner for the ideas in Helliconia?

PK: That’s a good point, and the answer is probably yes. But it is actually broader than that. In the very early 60s he read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring practically the moment it came out. It had a profound effect on him. He had had an interest in the environment ever since his time in India, but now it became one of the central themes in his work. It is there, for instance, in Hothouse, in Greybeard, in The Dark Light Years, in Earthworks, in Barefoot in the Head, and in countless short stories. So another way of looking at it is that Helliconia is the culmination of one of the most persistent themes in his work.

Ed Newsom: I think of Aldiss as constantly playing with the idea of science fiction, poking at its definition and edges. Was this the way he saw his work?

PK: I’m pretty sure he did. As I said above, he was an experimentalist, constantly playing around with what he could do with his writing, how far he could take it. That is why he was such a good fit for the new wave of New Worlds, even though he was older than anyone else in the New Worlds circle, the only one who had fought in the war, more conservative in his politics, more inclined to opera than pop, and so on. His taste in sf, as evidenced from the many anthologies he edited, was very traditional, but in his own writing he was very untraditional.

Alan Kovski: Aldiss offered interesting critical judgments about pre-1930s writers in Trillion Year Spree (and Billion Year Spree), but for post-1930s writers he seemed unable to maintain a critical distance. Do you see that? And was he a good critic of his own writing?

PK: This is tricky. As a historian myself I can testify that it is increasingly hard to maintain a critical distance the closer you come to your own time. And of course Billion Year Spree was 50 years ago, so I can look at it now with a critical distance I just wouldn’t have possessed when I first encountered it. With that proviso, and bearing in mind that I disagree with him profoundly on a lot that he writes about sf before Mary Shelley, I think he was a pretty good critic of sf up to and including the Second World War (he is often very good on H.G. Wells, for instance); and he is a reasonably good critic on sf up to the moment it fractured with the arrival of the new wave. He had an affinity for sf from the 40s and 50s, as shown by his many anthologies, though personally I think he could be too forgiving in his assessments.

As for whether he was a good critic of his own work: no. But then few writers are. The quality of his writing varied immensely, and he just didn’t see it. And he never caught on to the fact that books like, for example, Hothouse and Report on Probability A, were not going to appeal to exactly the same audience simply because they both featured a world in stasis.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Aldiss worked with Harry Harrison on many collections of SF stories, including a series of ‘Best SF…’/‘Years Best…’ collections in the 1970s. Were the two close in terms of how they saw SF, or did their opinions of various writers or types of stories vary a lot? Were they personally close?

PK: The two were very close. They were best friends from the time they met, in I think the early to mid 60s, until Harrison’s death in 2012. They went travelling together, they attended conventions together, they name-checked each other in their work, they went on drunken binges together. Indeed, sometimes it seemed that Aldiss spent more time with Harrison than he did with his wife. And their tastes in science fiction were practically indistinguishable. I would defy anyone to go through one of their joint anthologies and say with any degree of certainty that was Harrison’s choice, or that was Aldiss’s choice. That was why they jointly created the John W. Campbell Memorial Award when Campbell died.

John Grayshaw: Aldiss said that the difference between fantasy and Science fiction is that at the end of a fantasy novel the evil is defeated, and the world is restored to the way it was, but in a science fiction novel the world is changed forever. Then he said we all live in a world that’s changing forever. It’s never going to go back to what it was in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Do you think this is an apt difference between the genres?

PK: That, I’m afraid, is the sort of easy comparison that Aldiss would make when he wasn’t really thinking about it. The trouble is, it is easy to think of sf stories in which the world is restored, and fantasy stories in which it is changed forever (The Lord of the Rings is a very good example of this latter). What’s more, the world changing forever is something that can happen in mainstream fiction also. And he is right, we all live in a world that is changing forever; but then, everyone who has ever lived has lived in such a world. So no, it’s not an apt description.

John Grayshaw: Aldiss worked with David Wingrove on the ‘Trillion Year Spree’ that gave his analysis of SF up to the 1980s. What made Aldiss interested in writing about the history of science fiction in this book? What do you think were his most interesting findings?

PK: There is a very long answer to this question. In fact at the beginning of this year I gave a 7,000-word paper at an academic conference that was entirely about answering this question. Let me start by saying that Billion Year Spree is more interesting than Trillion Year Spree. He started writing Billion Year Spree at the very beginning of the 1970s, just after the publication of Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head, and at the point when The Hand-Reared Boy was about to come out. So Aldiss liked to claim that he had been so disappointed by the reception of the two sf novels that he had abandoned sf in favour of the mainstream; and therefore that Billion Year Spree was his return to sf. That doesn’t actually hold water. In the first place he had considered having both Report and Barefoot published as mainstream. Secondly, Hand-Reared Boy was already doing the rounds of publishers before Barefoot was completed. And thirdly, between Barefoot and Billion he produced one book of essays about sf, The Shape of Further Things; four collections of short stories; and he edited or co-edited something like seven sf anthologies. That is not the work of someone abandoning sf.

So why did he write Billion? My theory is that the new wave had put him in an increasingly uncomfortable position. His writing placed him very firmly in the new wave camp; but his tastes, as shown by the anthologies he edited, were equally firmly on the traditionalist side of the fence. As the dispute between new wave and traditionalist became ever more bitter, Aldiss found himself on both sides of the divide at the same time. So I think he had an agenda in writing Billion, which was to show that the new wave of the 60s was a natural development from the traditionalist sf of the 50s, which in turn developed from the 40s, and then the 30s, and so on. So there wasn’t a gap after all, and so Aldiss could be comfortably in both camps at the same time.

Because there was this polemical aspect to Billion I’m not sure we can really talk about findings. But what was both interesting and important about the book was that for the very first time he showed that it was possible to write a narrative history of science fiction. And that has, I think, totally changed the way we look at the literature.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Did they ever consider continuing on into the 90s or beyond? Or was Aldiss more interested in the origins and history of SF?

PK: Trillion came about because Billion was one of Aldiss’s most successful books. (Aldiss really liked to make comparisons between himself and H.G. Wells, and of course Wells’s most successful book was An Outline of History, so I think Aldiss would have been secretly pleased about the coincidence.) Anyway, because Billion was a hit, there was a certain amount of pressure to produce a sequel. But I’m not sure Aldiss was really interested in repeating himself, which is why he got David Wingrove involved. Now I don’t think Wingrove was necessarily a good choice for a project like this, and so I suspect that Aldiss wasn’t as happy with Trillion as he had been with Billion. And anyway I’m not sure there was the pressure to repeat the enterprise again. I don’t think there was ever any suggestion that they should do a Quintillian Year Spree.

John Grayshaw: What interested Aldiss about the world of ‘Greybeard’ and the idea of sudden collapse in fertility and an ageing population? What makes it a significant work?

PK: You need to understand the circumstances in which Aldiss wrote Greybeard. He had just split up from his first wife, and she had moved away to the Isle of Wight with their two children. So for the first time Aldiss was separated from his children, and for a while at least imagined he would never see them again. That is the emotional basis for the work. Yet curiously it is the only Aldiss work that I know of which features a happy, enduring, companionable marriage.

So you have on the one hand the symbolic loss of his children, and on the other the desire for a stable relationship. Add to that his ongoing interest in the environment, occasioned as I mentioned earlier by his reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. If you imagine the silence is not caused by the absence of wildlife but by the absence of children, then you have everything that goes to make the novel.

Why is it significant? Well so far as I am concerned it is simply one of the two or three best things he ever wrote. And it confronts a really important issue.

Damo Mac Choiligh: What did Aldiss make of the success of the novel ‘Children of Men’ by PD James and its film version? Was he in any way irritated by how close the concepts in that novel and film were to his own work ‘Greybeard’? (Personally, I dislike the book, but I really like the film.)

PK: I really don’t know. I don’t recall seeing anywhere any comments he made on either the novel or the film. He knew PD James – he called her “the Dame” – but I don’t think he was necessarily a fan of her work. And I certainly wouldn’t expect him to be a fan of Children of Men. But I can’t say for sure. (And like you I think the film is way better than the novel.)

John Grayshaw/Damo Mac Choiligh: What interested Aldiss about the world of the Generation ship in ‘Non-Stop’. What makes it a significant work? How did Aldiss think it compared to other works, such as the later ‘Universe’ by Robert Heinlein? What do you think he would have made of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Aurora’, with its very pessimistic view of generation ships?

PK: Non-Stop was actually written in response to Universe. Aldiss was annoyed by the heroic, competent man story told in Universe. He wanted to present a contrary viewpoint on the story, one without heroism, one in which the people involved could not suddenly produce an answer to their situation, one in which the universe is not a puzzle to be solved but rather an existential threat. Generally, Aldiss did not approve of the sort of competent man stories advocated by John W. Campbell and written by people like Heinlein. He felt it was a false picture, so he deliberately wrote a novel that echoed Universe but undermined every assumption that Heinlein made. What makes it significant, therefore, aside from the simple fact that it was his first sf novel, and a very good one, is that it presented a counternarrative to the then dominant sf narrative coming out of America, the narrative that says that straight, white, American men can solve every conundrum that the universe throws at them. It was something that we hadn’t really seen in sf to that point, and so it declared that there was a different way of writing sf.

As for Aurora, I suspect he would have recognised how much Robinson borrowed from Aldiss’s novel. And Aldiss always approved of things like that.

John Grayshaw: What interested Aldiss about the Artificial lifeforms in “Super-Toy All Summer Long”? And was this story significant in terms of Aldiss’ works before Kubrick and Spielberg’s interest in it and adapting it into the movie “AI”?

PK: Aldiss produced an awful lot of stories that dealt with robots, robot independence, and the like. Just think of stories like “Who Can Replace A Man?” of “The Girl and the Robot with Flowers”. It was one of the interests he kept returning to, it allowed him to play with questions about the nature of intelligence and the role of humankind. I suspect that “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” was just another variant on a theme. At least until the Kubrick/Spielberg film came along. Then, of course, it became significant. It’s interesting that in 2001, the year the film was released, Aldiss suddenly produced four more supertoys stories: “Supertoys: Play Can Be So Deadly”, “Supertoys: What Fun to be Reborn”, “Supertoys in Other Seasons”, and “Supertoys When Winter Comes”. Though I don’t think any of these (not even the original) stand out among his short fiction. I’m reluctant to say he was cashing in, but he was at least taking advantage of a story that had attracted unexpected attention.

John Grayshaw: You said in the last interview that “The Girl and Robot with Flowers” is one of your all-time favorite science fiction stories. Can you tell us why it is significant and why it is your favorite?

PK: Did I say science fiction stories, or did I just say one of my all-time favourite stories? I rather incline to the second. This is partly because “The Girl and the Robot with Flowers” isn’t actually science fiction; and partly because it is, to my mind, the story that epitomizes the British new wave.

I’m not going to go into arguments about the nature of the new wave, because none of us have time for that. So let me just say that the new wave in Britain and the new wave in America were two very different things. In America the new wave was a reaction against the constraints by which sf writers unquestioningly avoided topics like sex and politics. In Britain it was more a way of opening sf up to a slew of literary influences like modernism and experimentation. And for me the Aldiss story is the archetypal example of that literary openness.

“The Girl and the Robot with Flowers” is not a science fiction story, it’s a story about science fiction. It’s a story about a writer, unnamed but living in Oxford with a wife called Margaret and friends like Harry Harrison, so a pretty good match for Aldiss himself. He’s about to go for a picnic with his wife and friends, but before they do he needs to talk about the story he has just finished. It’s a very traditional sf story about an interstellar robot war, and he is uneasy about it, and his wife expresses unease also. It’s a story that questions the nature of sf, while fixing sf within the here and now, and it is beautifully done. It’s a story that says we shouldn’t be writing about robots in space, but about a humming refrigerator in Oxford today, because sf is about the contemporary human experience. It is a story that could have been published in any literary journal, but because it appeared in New Worlds it subtly changed the whole nature of sf.

John Grayshaw: “Report on Probability A” has been called an antinovel and a seminal work in British new wave. And in our previous interview you said that “Barefoot in the Head” was the place to start to get a sense of what new wave was. Can you go into more detail about what is significant about these novels?

PK: Report was originally written right at the beginning of the 60s, and was an attempt to write something in the style of the French nouveau roman, or “anti-novel” as they were popularly called. It was rejected by multiple publishers, and shelved. Then in the mid-60s Moorcock asked if he had anything suitable for New Worlds and Aldiss dug out the rejected novel. He added the extra layers of observers, just to make it more science fictional, and changed the title from Garden with Figures to Report on Probability A.

At the same time that he was preparing Report for publication he was asked by the editor of Science Fantasy magazine if he had a travel story, and so he wrote the first part of Barefoot.

They were both written as science fiction, but they were both written to draw on influences from the mainstream, the nouveau roman in the case of Report and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in the case of Barefoot. And indeed, as I hinted earlier, Aldiss contemplated having them both published as mainstream novels.

What these two novels exemplify, therefore, is the sense of a literature that crosses over between the overtly science fictional and the overtly realist. And it is that cross over, that sense that they belong on two sides of the divide at once, that exemplifies what was happening in the British new wave.

John Grayshaw: Aldiss called “White Mars” a counter-argument to the idea of terraforming. What do you think are the most interesting ideas in this novel?

PK: I’ll be honest, I think White Mars is one of the worst novels that he wrote. Not quite as bad as The Eighty-Minute Hour, perhaps, but not far from it. It was, of course, written just after the death of his wife, Margaret, and I’m pretty sure his mind wasn’t on it, but at the same time he was emotionally invested in it. He was very touchy about it. There is an appalling letter in Foundation in which he really attacks someone who wrote an essay on the book that was, at worst, mildly critical of come of the ideas in the book.

I am not sure there are any interesting ideas in the novel. The characters are never better than two-dimensional; the science (despite the influence of Roger Penrose) is full of a lot of hand-waving and coincidence; and the whole point of the book comes down to Mars being a living entity. Like a similarly-titled novel, Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven, it is clearly written in response to the success of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, but Robinson includes far better arguments both for and against terraforming than you will find in White Mars.

John Grayshaw: Other than the ones we already talked about, what are some of Aldiss’ best short stories and what makes them stand out?

PK: That is a big question. You know that, if you include the various pieces that made up The Brightfount Diaries, he wrote something like 400 stories in his career. Without wanting to go into details, my personal favourites include:

Poor Little Warrior
But Who Can Replace a Man?
Old Hundredth
Man on Bridge
Man in His Time
The Girl and the Robot with Flowers
The Saliva Tree
Confluence
As for our Fatal Continuity
Last Orders
The Gods in Flight
How the Gates Opened and Closed
But ask me again and I’ll probably come up with a different list.

Damo Mac Choligh: In many of his shorter works, especially in the Zodiac Planets stories, Aldiss seems very interested in Chinese culture and power. Where did this interest come from? Was he apprehensive about Chinese dominance in the future?

PK: Like so much else in Aldiss’s life and career, you can probably trace this back to his time in the army. After the war, his final posting before he returned to Britain in 1947 was in Hong Kong, where he was posted after serving time in Sumatra. His time in the army was the time he felt most alive, most free, most happy and so the places he associated with the army, the East – India, Burma, Sumatra, and Hong Kong – had an almost mystical hold over Aldiss’s imagination ever after. It became equated with sex and warmth and joy and mystery. I don’t think he was ever apprehensive about anything to do with the East, it was something he relished and wanted to return to.

John Grayshaw: What interested Brian Aldiss about mini-saga the form of extremely short stories he invented?

PK: As I’ve said a couple of times already in this interview, Aldiss was an experimentalist. He loved to play around with the form, stretch it in new directions, try out different things. The short story was an obvious way of conducting his experiments, because it didn’t take much in the way of time or of words to lay out the new idea. But sometime in the last third of his career he seemed to become impatient even with the short story and started to look for ways to cut things down even more, get straight to the point and then move on. I do wonder if he began to feel time’s winged chariot, and so wanted to do more and more in less and less time, but I suppose we’ll never know. Anyway, he began writing ever more concentrated pieces, such as the various Enigmas and the mini-sagas. To my mind the mini-sagas in particular seem to take on the lineaments of a joke: a quick set-up and an even quicker punch line. They feel limited in what they can achieve, though I suppose if they work they work instantly.

John Grayshaw: What interested Aldiss about Yugoslavia? He wrote a travel book about it in 1966 called ‘Cities and Stones’ and some of his novels and short stories are set there.

PK: I think it’s quite simple: he loved the place. He visited with family and friends (I’d have to check, but I think Harry Harrison was on that trip) and financed it by arranging to write about the place. Which turned into Cities and Stones; and I think that became the standard against which he measured any other trips abroad that he made.

John Grayshaw: What can you tell us about Aldiss’ interest in art. It sounds like it had a sci-fi element to it. He had an exhibit in Oxford in 2010 titled “The Other Hemisphere” and one of his paintings was called “Metropolis.”

PK: I’m not really a good person to ask about art. I know a little, but not much. There does seem to have been an artistic strain in the family, his daughter Wendy is a very fine photographer. But where his own interest in art came from and how it developed I just don’t know. It’s not something that crops up in his autobiography, for instance. So his own art, like his interest in poetry, seems to have remained a private interest until quite late in his career.

John Grayshaw: What kind of feedback did you get about your book on Aldiss?

PK: Interesting. It hasn’t been as widely reviewed or as well received as the book on Iain Banks, which doesn’t totally surprise me. Aldiss is a more divisive figure than Banks, for a start. But the book did earn me my first review in the Times Literary Supplement, which is a kind of badge of honour, I suppose. The one thing that did interest me was the fact that female reviewers latched on to what I called his “priapic masculinity”, and ended up largely reviewing Aldiss the man. Male reviewers, on the other hand, tended to focus on which books I praised and which I criticised, so their reviews tended to be about whether or not they agreed with my assessments. Nobody seems to be neutral about Aldiss, and nobody seems to be comfortable with saying some of his work was good and some of it was bad.

What that says about me, about my book, or about Aldiss, I just don’t know.

John Grayshaw: What myths about Aldiss do you hope your book clears up?

John Grayshaw: What is the most important idea you hope readers will take away from your book on Aldiss?

PK: I’m going to take these two questions together as one. I had no settled view on Aldiss when I set out to write the book, and my opinions changed during the writing of the book. For instance, the first time I read Report on Probability A I hated it, but when I revisited it as part of my reading for the book I came away convinced it was the best thing he ever wrote. Meanwhile my journey on The Eighty Minute Hour was in exactly the opposite direction, I went from thinking it was okay, rather fun, to feeling it was the worst thing he ever wrote. That ambivalence is something I hope people take away from the book.

Much the same holds true about the person. I knew him slightly and always found him excellent company, though he could be prickly and ever ready to attack anyone he didn’t feel was fully on his side. And yet the more I read, both in his autobiographical writing and in his fiction, the more unhappy I became about his attitude towards sex and women (that whole “priapic masculinity” thing). Again, I want people to take that ambivalence from the book.

And then there is his place in science fiction. I feel he was of vital importance in giving character to the British new wave, yet the more I went into the issue the less I felt he was actually a new wave writer. Similarly, his history of science fiction is the first narrative history of the subject, the first work to treat it as a whole, and as such it is of extraordinary importance. In a sense it is how we learned to see ourselves. And yet the more I examine it, the more I disagree with just about everything in Billion Year Spree. Again, ambivalence: but that approach, unsettled and unsettling, is essential not only in considering individual writers like Aldiss, but in considering science fiction as a whole.

So what should you take away? Aldiss was an incredibly important writer, but that doesn’t mean that everything he wrote was important, or even good. Aldiss spent his entire career trying his hand at different things, some of them worked many of them didn’t, but it is as important to consider the failures as it is to consider the successes. Aldiss is divisive, no one will agree on what was good and what was bad, what was important and what wasn’t; you have to find your own way through, you have to make up your own mind, but the journey is worth it.