Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBEis an English writer and anthologies editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society. He is alsoco-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Aldiss was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth18 August 1925
Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!
The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world--in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind--can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil.
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity. ---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss
Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.
I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.
Let's have a toast-to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!
What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?
Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.
I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
The shuffle only demonstrated people's fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.
When knowledge becomes formulated into a science, then it does take on a life of it's own, often alien to the human spirit that conceived it.
My briefest ever definition of science fiction is 'Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.'
When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations.