Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/21/supertoys.html
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RIP. My two short stories favorites of his are “The Failed Men,” and “An Appearance of Life.” There’s a sadness to them that almost chills, and I regularly re-read them.
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My favorite by him is ‘Hothouse’.
And nothing wrong with anyone who writes poetry about cats.
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I’ve always liked his “My Country, ‘Tis Not Only of Thee” – which is about a near future where Britain is engaged in a civil war between a socialist North and a capitalist South and as usual in these cases, the US gets involved. It is obviously a commentary on Vietnam, but the lessons apply to our current round of “nation building” as well.
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It’s actually “Helliconia” with an extra “i” near the middle.
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Hothouse was an eye opener when I was a kid - I read it in my early teens and it always stayed with me. Heliconia was good stuff too. The giants I grew up reading are almost gone…
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Ah. This is a big one alright. RIP Mr. Aldiss. We were lucky to have you so long.
Just so - I reread Last Orders regularly; gotta love its gentle melancholy, its understated end-of-days ambience, and its wonderful paean to the irresistable allure of a good bar.
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This has been a bad year for literature in Oxford*.
First Colin Dexter died, then Heathcote Williams, now Brian W Aldiss.
* It probably hasn’t been any worse than any other year, but it feels bad
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Wrote wonderful and incredible stories.
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As a very young boy, one of the first science fiction stories I ever read was “The Saliva Tree”. Along with Jack Vance and Theodore Sturgeon, Aldiss got me thoroughly, irredeemably hooked on SF. I took it from there and worked my way through just about all the great authors active during the 60’s. And because the adults in my world didn’t read it, I was incredibly lucky not to be subjected to the kind of censorship a little boy would normally have encountered.
I think I’m a better person for it, and I have to thank Brian Aldiss.
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While I disliked the abrupt ending, I did like the grand ideas behind his ‘Manuscript Found in a Police State’.
A enormous prison is built as a wheel in a mountain, in which it takes 10 years for a cell to go into the mountain from the entrance before the prisoner comes back out. It moves by all the prisoners pulling on chains in their cells.
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