2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Brian W. Aldiss who died in 2017. Aldiss wrote in a multitude of genres including realism, fantasy, horror, pornography, as well as writing poetry and plays. However, he is best remembered for his association with science fiction and in particular his short-story ‘Super-Toys Last All Summer Long’ (1969) which would form the basis of the film directed by Steven Spielberg AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001).
His science fiction was as varied as his other outputs and included space opera, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, utopian, and experimental narratives. The advantage to such variation has been that his work has been difficult to pigeonhole. Conversely, the variation has meant that his work has been difficult to grasp as a whole and so has received less critical attention than it deserves.
In the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Liverpool, we hold a part of the archives of Brian W. Aldiss along with a library of books belonging to him, The Brian W. Aldiss Library (the main Aldiss archive is held at The Bodleian, in Oxford). As part of the centenary celebrations we are putting on an online exhibition called ‘Brian Aldiss and the Natural World’. The exhibition tries to understand Aldiss’s work through the theme of depictions of the environment. Aldiss returned to the theme again and again, from his earliest science fiction novel Non-Stop (1958) that featured a spaceship overgrown by jungle, to his last novel The Finches of Mars (2013) which explored the impact of the harsh environment of Mars on humans living there.
One particular item included in the exhibition attests to the early genesis of the environmental theme in Aldiss’s science fiction. The item is an essay written when Aldiss was sixteen years old in 1942 about ‘a type of story known as Science Fiction’. The essay is titled ‘Perhaps, one day…’ and is written on lined paper in black ink with pencil markings indicating the teacher’s comments and corrections.
BWA/4/1/2/6 – ‘Perhaps, one day…’
In the essay Aldiss describes his discovery of science fiction, the themes he sees in science fiction stories, their scientific inaccuracies, and why he was drawn to them. Aldiss relates his first encounter with science fiction in ‘an unusual magazine’. Later, Aldiss would give the exact time and place of this encounter. In 1938, Aldiss came across science fiction in the Woolworth’s newsagent in Gorelston-on-Sea in Norfolk in the form of a science fiction magazine [1]. Unsold US science fiction magazines were used as ballast in transatlantic shipping. The magazines would then end up in newsagents in the UK on shelves marked ‘Yank Mags’. Though the young Aldiss writes in the essay that the writing ‘was poor’ he says that the stories sowed ‘the seed of curiosity […] in my mind’.
Aldiss then describes his next steps in exploring the genre, which involved visits to the library to read H. G. Wells. He read The War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901) and saw the film Things to Come (1936) adapted from Wells’s book The Shape of Things to Come (1933). The impact of Wells on Aldiss at a young age was considerable. Aldiss would later write that H. G. Wells was ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’ [2] and would write sequels of a sort to Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and The Shape of Things To Come in the works Moreau’s Other Island (1980) and The Shape of Further Things (1970).
The process of reading science fiction leads him to two activities described in the essay that would stay with him for the rest of his life: criticising the fictional worlds in the stories and imagining his own. For the young Aldiss, the writing of the stories ‘was poor’ and in the end ‘failed to attract me’. Further, he criticises the scientific inaccuracies of the texts, pointing out that ships burning in space and going faster than the speed of light is impossible. However, these stories inspire him to form his own. He imagines space in poetic terms as ‘black, the darkness of profundity’ and moves on to ‘work out what each planet in the solar system looked like’ along with their attendant lifeforms.
It is in the section imagining life on other planets that he first formulated the idea that science fiction explores the relationship between humans and their environment. As a result of reading encyclopaedias and books on astronomy to help him imagine these worlds, he realises that ‘man [is] governed by his environs.’ This allows him to think about how humans or humanoid lifeforms might be adapted to the landscape and atmospheres of their planets.
This pastime would develop into a literary career that spanned six decades. In his science fiction novels, the environment, whether artificial or planetary, shape the people and their actions. In his epic ‘Helliconia’ trilogy (1982-1985), for example, humanoids living on a planet with seasons lasting centuries physically change to adapt to their changing environment, effecting every aspect of their societies.
In his influential history of science fiction Billion Year Spree (1973), Aldiss would more explicitly lay out this underlying concept. According to Aldiss, the best science fiction deals with humans in relation to their ‘changing surroundings and abilities: what might loosely be called environmental fiction.’ Rather than simply being about technology or the future, science fiction for Aldiss was principally about the adaptation of humans to the world around them.
Aldiss’s essay in 1942 only received a C mark. However, in it we can see the outlines of a rigorous and imaginative mind overtaken with the wonder of a newly discovered genre. And here too we can see the theory of science fiction – that it concerns the relationship between people and planet—that would form the bedrock of all his strange and wonderful works.
The Brian Aldiss and the Natural World exhibition—to launch on the 23rd of August—aims to explore further this underlying theme in his work. The exhibition begins with his early life at school and during the Second World War. It then explores his early, mid-, and later career through his major novels. The exhibition features items from Special Collections and Archives Science Fiction Collections, including from the Brian W. Aldiss archive, the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, and the Brian W. Aldiss Library.
If you would like to see some of the physical items going into the exhibition and bit more about the process of putting it together then come to the launch event at the VG&M’s Waterhouse café on Saturday the 23rd of August from 3 to 5pm: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1484688987729?aff=oddtdtcreator
For more information about the work of Brian Aldiss I would recommend the wonderful book by Paul Kinkaid, Brian W. Aldiss (2022).
[1] Brian W. Aldiss, The Shape of Further Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 56.
[2] Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 132.
[3] Ibid, p. 11