Helliconia

About the Author

Brian Aldiss was born in 1925. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Signals in Burma and Sumatra. In 1948 he was demobilised and became an assistant in an Oxford bookshop. His first published SF novel was Non-Stop, published in 1958.

By 1962 he had already won an award for his series of novellas collectively known as Hothouse, and during the 1960s he wrote some of his most famous novels: Greybeard (1964), Report on Probability A (1968) and Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia (1969). In addition, The Saliva Tree (1965) won the Nebula award for best novella. He continued his prolific output throughout the 1970s but achieved his greatest acclaim in the 1980s for the three massively researched novels Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983) and Helliconia Winter (1985), the first of which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

He subsequently turned his attention to straight fiction focusing on aspects of his own life (such as Forgotten Life (1988)) or autobiography (Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman (1998)) before returning to SF.

Throughout his writing career, Aldiss has been both an anthologist and a critic, involved in both the Penguin Science Fiction and The Year’s Best SF series. Both Billion Year Spree (1973) and its expanded follow-up Trillion Year Spree (1986) are considered classic surveys of SF. The latter won a Hugo Award in 1987.

He has also worked as a reviewer and essayist, writing for the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, and the Washington Post. In 2001, his short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long was the basis for the Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Aldiss was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2005. He currently lives in Oxford.