From Fiction to Fact – Brian Aldiss awarded OBE

Brian Aldiss was one of many pupils who left the College at a young age at the start of WW2 and didn’t return. Brian had indelible memories of life at Fram in the 1930’s.

Brian later served with the Royal Signals Regiment in Burma.

After leaving the army, Brian worked as a bookseller in Oxford that provided the background for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955), a volume of short stories. His first science fiction novel, Non-Stop, was published in 1958 while he was working as literary editor of the Oxford Mail between 1958 and 1969. He has written over 75 fiction and science-fiction titles including Hothouse (1962), which won the Hugo Award, The Saliva Tree (1966), which was awarded the Nebula, and Helliconia Spring (1982), which won both the British Science Fiction Association Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Brian’s autobiographical fiction includes The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) and A Soldier Erect (1971), and he has also written three volumes of autobiography, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990), The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman (1998) and When the Feast is Finished (1999). He is the author of several poetry collections, including Home Life with Cats (1992) and A Plutonian Monologue on His Wife’s Death (2000).

Several of his books, including Frankenstein Unbound (filmed 1990), have been adapted for the cinema. Most recently, his story, ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’, was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. His latest books are Super-State (2002) and Jocasta (2005), a reworking of Sophocles’ classic Theban plays, Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Brian has won numerous awards for science-fiction writing including a Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and a Prix Jules Verne (Sweden). He lives in Oxford.

On 31 October 2015 he was the subject of a 2 page article in the Daily Telegraph magazine entiled “The world of Brian Aldiss, science-fiction writer”. You can see the article here

There are numerous websites providing further information on Brian such as:

Wikipedia.org and his official website.