Brian Aldiss was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, in 1925 and died in Oxford in 2017, a day after his 92nd birthday. He served in the Royal Corps of Signals in India, Burma and Sumatra until 1947, and those years fed his later fiction. His first book, The Brightfount Diaries, appeared in 1955; his first science fiction novel, Non-Stop, followed in 1958.
He wrote science fiction, but also mainstream novels, including the army-based Horatio Stubbs books, and he worked as an anthologist and historian of the genre. His science fiction tends toward the pessimistic, with entropy hanging over much of it, though the early stories are also exuberant and often funny. The Helliconia trilogy (1982 to 1985) follows a planet circling a double star, where a long cycle of seasons governs whole civilizations. His critical history Billion Year Spree (1973) put H. G. Wells at the centre of the story of the genre, and he became a vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society.
The Hothouse stories won the 1962 Hugo Award for short fiction, and The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths won a Nebula Award. Helliconia Spring took the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and he was named a Grand Master of science fiction for 1999. His short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" was one of the sources for Steven Spielberg's film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
If you came from The War of the Worlds, you have already met him as the writer of the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, which also has Patrick Parrinder's editing and Andy Sawyer's notes. Wells wrote the novel, not Aldiss. For Aldiss's own fiction, start with Non-Stop, a generation-ship story, then try Hothouse, set on a far-future Earth crowded with evolved plant life.
