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
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
Let's have a toast-to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!
Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!
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.
I have had wealth, rank and power, but, if these were all I had, how wretched I should be.
Fantasy is literature for teenagers.
The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period.
A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?
Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.
I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.
That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to... grapple with the unfamiliar.
Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode.
To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important.
I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.