Brian Aldiss
The SF icon talks about a lifetime of literary time travel, and his encounters with Tolkien, Kubrick, Amis, and Christie
Out of all the people I’ve interviewed, my encounter with Science Fiction Grandmaster Brian Aldiss will always be one of my favourites. I first met him at a party at Stanley Kubrick’s Hertfordshire mansion in 2010. We were there to celebrate a book about A.I, Steven Spielberg’s version of Aldiss’s short story, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long. Kubrick and Aldiss had initially developed the script together, but sadly the director didn’t live long enough to realise his vision on the big screen and left it to Spielberg.
Mr Aldiss was standing on his own in Kubrick’s red walled library in front of a shelf that contained the director’s personal copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He professed to not being much of a fan of Spielberg’s interpretation of his book, which made us both laugh. We sipped champagne and arranged to do a proper interview at his house. A week later I was driving down the M40 to visit him in Old Headington.
He welcomed me warmly, and gave me a tour of his house, starting in his office. Brian pulled out the solitary copy of his autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, on the cover of which he sat naked astride a sewage duct in Burma. I pointed out what a massive pipe he had between his legs, and he cracked up. We then talked about the stories behind his paintings before going outside to soak up the summer sun. His garden took my breath away. It was lush and totally overgrown At the end was a swimming pool that had become a pond through years of inactivity. It seemed fitting that the author of Hothouse owned a plot where the plants had taken over its human obstructions.
We then went to a local bar, which was exhibiting a collection of his paintings. I bought us a bottle of white wine and we chatted for hours about his life, collaborations and writing. It was one of the most entertaining afternoons I’ve ever had. We stayed in touch a bit afterwards, as I proposed doing an exhibition of his book covers, but sadly we both never got around to it.
This afternoon, the sad news came through that Brian has died, aged 92. He was a true master of science fiction, and one of the greatest raconteurs I’ve ever met. In tribute to this miraculous man, I’ve dug up our interview and published it here in full for the first time.
Rest in peace, Brian — see you in stars sometime.
Tim Noakes, 21 August 2017
At Home with Brian Aldiss, 2010
“I’ve been writing stories since the age of three, although I’ve no idea what they were about. They’ve happily vanished with time. I was brought up in the middle of Norfolk in a dull town. It had a cinema, and very few other cultural activities except the damn church. My parents were religious, and I thought I was too because I would go around praying all the time. It was only some years later I realised it wasn’t faith. It was neurosis.
When my sister was born, I happened to have whooping cough. Now, whooping cough is bad enough when you’re 5, but when you’re a baby it’d probably kill you, so I had to go. That I perfectly understood. What I couldn’t understand, or rather what I couldn’t accept, was the way in which my parents did it. I was shipped out to my granny’s in Peterborough and naturally enough she didn’t want to have a little boy who was sick and ill and coughing and throwing up. I can’t blame her. When I finally went back home I was very upset. I was a mixed up kid. I thought I’d been up in Peterborough for 6 months. It was only 6 weeks. Nothing to make a great fuss of but that was the way it was. And instead of treating me with love and kindness they were furious with me because I was unhappy. So they sent me off to a boarding school which certainly wasn’t bad, but certainly wasn’t good. And from there they sent me to public school.
I enjoyed visiting my Grandmother. Peterborough was a civilised city. It had beautiful swimming baths, libraries and in particular, a museum that my uncles would take me to. Thank God for my uncles. It had a big long glass case and I was just tall enough to stand on top toe and look into it. And in there they had a full and perfect dinosaur skeleton that had been fished out of the mud of the river Nene which you could see it from the museum windows. This creature had actually lived there! I cannot tell you how much I loved that creature, I thought it was so marvellous. Whenever possible I would go and see it, count its spines. So that there was a better place to live in than the town in which my parents lived. My imagination caught fire.
Then the war came along. That seemed to catch everyone’s attention. I left school and volunteered to join the army. I went to see a recruiting sergeant, who had a little cabin on the high street. I went in there and said I wanted to join. He looked down his list and he said “Well what do you want to join?”. I said “The Royal Signals, I think I’m quite a good communicator”. So he said “Royal Signals don’t have any vacancies. How about the submarine service? We’ve got plenty of room there”. Come on, sergeant! I wasn’t born yesterday — or maybe I was — but I was no fool. Of course there was room in the submarine service. Jesus Christ! They were sinking left right and centre! So I joined the army and I was almost immediately drafted into the Signals.
“I believe all SF writers have got a quarrel with something.”
I believe all SF writers have got a quarrel with something. I suddenly had a quarrel with Britain because I’d been through this business in Burma. I’d been over at India, full of shit and flies, then I was in Sumatra. I spent a year there. I ran a theatre. I kind of got out of the army, they gave me a theatre to run that I could decorate. The idea was we could entertain the locals, dance with the women, have film shows, all the rest of it. All that was very pleasant and sweet. I had a nice year there. Nevertheless then I was back in India, at monsoon time where every puddle was full of 2 frogs copulating and the whole place was rife with snakes. A miserable place. And at that time there was a general election in England, the one that got rid of Churchill and got Clement Attlee in instead. I wasn’t allowed to vote because I wasn’t 21. This turned me against England. I thought, ‘what a rotten shitty place’. I had been out in India for 3/4 years, enduring God knows what, malaria, all sorts.
When I returned, I got on a train to Oxford. What I knew about Oxford was that it had bookshops and libraries and was a good place to be as a writer. What I found later was that there were all sorts of other benefits including the fact that when you submitted a story with a covering letter to a magazine in the United States, that word Oxford rang a bell. It wasn’t as if you were saying you were in Clifton Hamden or some fucking place like that. Oxford! Oh this guy comes from Oxford!? So that immediately a sort of good impression was created. And I think that was quite a help to me really although it wasn’t for some time until I realised that it looks quite good in an address.
When I first met Kingsley Amis he came down to Oxford to give a lecture. Lucky Jim had been very successful but he was still kind of amateur. He came down and gave a lecture, at Exeter College. It actually wasn’t a particularly good lecture, he got better at it later, with practice, but he asked for a round of questions and I liked this guy, I thought he was fun, but I felt embarrassed for him, because no one would ask any questions. I’d never met him before, I said, “Mr Amis, can you tell if you think anyone could make a living writing SF?” and I forget what he said precisely but it was something to the effect of, well, there’s luck in this as with everything. Okay. Safe answer really, as we were all filing out, he was standing by the door thanking everybody for coming and so forth. He asked me my name, and I said, “Brian Aldiss! Are you the guy that wrote Outside?”. Jesus he actually read Outside! I knew that was a good story, maybe my first good story, whatever that means. It was called Outside and the first sentence was, “They never went out of the house” so you know there’s a conflict there at once. Kingsley had actually read my story, I’d never met anyone who had read any of my fiction before. I think it was 1955. We had a drink and got smashed and we became friends from then on.
My first wife was just impossible. She had a mother who had ruined her life and I hated her [mother]. I thought she was a woman out of hell. To try and mend this I said ‘Well lets go and see marriage guidance, see if they can’t sort us out”. She wouldn’t come. Jesus. I wrote Non-Stop when I was in that dreadful situation. I was trapped in this own tight-arse little world and these people are trapped, and they’ve been trapped for several generations, in these spaceships, they believe it to be the world. Now, when that was translated into Polish it went to number two on the bestseller list. So I went over to Poland to see if I could find out and they said, ‘Oh yeah of course Brian, we know very well you were writing a great big metaphor for the way we are trapped in the communist system.’ ‘Oh fuck was I really!?’ That is the value of Science Fiction — it is the metaphorical quality that what I thought of as one rather narrow thing could apply to a whole society.
“By the time Hothouse came out, I was really broke, between marriages and I was living in one room in a little Oxford slum, which was quite fun.”
Afterwards I sold my house and gave all the money to my wife. I went to live in one room slum. That’s life isn’t it. By the time Hothouse came out, I was really broke, between marriages and I was living in one room in a little Oxford slum, which was quite fun. I was a friend of C.S.Lewis’ because he was very keen on science fiction. Lewis got hold of a copy of Hothouse and liked it very much and said “Oh Brian this is tremendous” I’m going to send a copy to my friend Tolkien, and everyone in Oxford knew Tolkien in those days before he was famous, he’d walk about in suits with his Anglo-Saxon grammar and a very vague expression. So he read it and he actually sent me a letter to say how much he’d enjoyed it and how much of a wonderful feat of the imagination he thought it was. And of course I was very chuffed with this, but I about a month later I got another letter from Tolkien saying “I’ve re-read your novel again and I don’t think I’ve praised it enough, its absolutely splendid.” Now those two letters from Tolkien, I could live for a year on them if I sold them, but of course I lost them in the slum, being drunk. I mean, two letters from Tolkien and I lose them! God!
I had a son and a girl by my first wife and then a son and a girl by my second wife. My kids are a terrific lot. Without them you hit the buffers. You get old, you fucking want to die and there’s nothing there. But family goes on. Next week my first granddaughter will be born. I’ve already got 6 grandsons but now there’s going to be a granddaughter. My family thinks it’s absolutely marvellous that Jimi Hendrix liked my books. I never met Hendrix but there’s a photo of him reading one of my novels. I was greatly chuffed when I saw that, although he looks a bit puzzled by it.
“My family thinks it’s marvellous that Jimi Hendrix liked my books. I never met Hendrix but there’s a photo of him reading one of my novels. I was greatly chuffed when I saw that, although he looks a bit puzzled by it.”
I wrote Super Toys as a direct reaction to my formative rejection by my parents. Five years before I was born my mother gave birth to a still-born child and she so fantasised about that, she was seized upon that, paralysed by ‘I was never going to be as good as that wonderful child was’. So that’s the way in which you use something possibly without knowing it and that’s what gives your writing power actually. You use whatever tools you’ve got, whatever is there, and put it into a story.
I know so many writers who will plan everything out beforehand and then they will write it out. I could never do that. Of course it takes you a year, you know, to write a novel and so, it’s an adventure- you start out you’ve got an idea and you think, ‘I could see this one out.’ You start writing it. Christ it’s an adventure. You enjoy it.
One time, very early in my writing career I was taken to lunch at All Souls, which is an old collegiate college in Oxford, to have lunch with Mr and Mrs Agatha Christie. She was terribly nice, a bit grand it’s true but she had every right to be grand. And eventually far into the meal and the second bottle of wine someone said to her, ‘Agatha do tell us, your novels are so complex, how do you manage to work out this crime.’ And her answer was so marvellous, she said, rather dismissively, ‘Oh, I go ahead and right an ordinary novel about a lot of people and it’s only when I get to the penultimate chapter that I stop and think, ‘Now who’s the least likely person to have done this crime!’’ So she says, ‘Alright I pick on this guy and all it needs is to change a time on the timetable that he arrives at such-and-such a place and perhaps his relationships have to be altered- this girl that he knew that could be his sister or the sister could be a cousin or something like that.’ And she says, ‘and that’s it, it’s done.’ Absolutely marvellous.
I believe that secretly that the ‘middle classes’ think that SF is for the working class. Is this a viable theory? I’ve no idea. The number of times I could have been invited to do something on television or whatever and I’m not. Why? Because I write Science Fiction. And so I know those are decided decisions against it. For instance by P.D. James, the old cow. And Stephen Fry too. Another old cow. The fact is if you’re still able to write, that’s a great thing because my life does depend on my writing. I would never be stifled as I wasn’t. I don’t think I’ve been shitty enough. I think I should’ve been a lot more shitty to a lot of people.
I suppose one of the best SF films ever is Alien. Ridley Scott knew what he was doing. When you get on that planet it, oh God it really is awful! But I really thought AI was a drivelling sort of movie. And I wondered actually working with Stanley if he hadn’t run out of creative energy. He’d made so many films that were absolutely startling: 2001, A Space Odyssey, Dr Strangelove and above all Barry Lyndon. Barry Lyndon is a great cut-glass vase, a wonderful film, never praised it enough. The fact was Stanley gave a shit about lighting it as it would have been lit back then, by candle light. After you’ve seen that film filmed by these strange lights you’re never going to believe a historical movie again where the lights are overhead and glaring down because Stanley did it for real. With just a lens and one candle. The effect is mind-blowing really. You have to envy and admire Stanley for that.
I once called Stanley the greatest SF writer the age, but I was probably pissed at the time. When we were working together my wife Margaret said to me ‘Oh God darling why are you putting yourself through this’. And I said’ ‘Well I always wanted to work with a genius’. And I never thought it was going to be easy and indeed it wasn’t easy. But there were so many compensations, including Stanley’s marvellous sense of humour. I mean many a time we were rocking with laughter. So that was good, And we spent all the day- it’s no wonder he died- smoking and drinking coffee, arguing about what was going to come next. And every now and then he would give up and we would tramp through the halls and go and see Christiane and getting her smile and her calmness and when we’d go back to work.
A guy would come and collect me in a limousine — a slim, Italian guy- and so we’d get to castle Kubrick about the time that Stanley was coming down-about sort of 10 o’clock in the morning. Perhaps he’d say to me ‘Brian do you want some fresh air’, he’d open the door and there was all the fresh air of Childwickbury, he’d light a cigarette, we’d walk about the length of a cricket pitch, he’d say ‘That’s enough’ and we’d go back in. And that’s his fresh air for the day. He died of it. He died of it. His dedication was such he died of it, his dedication. I think you have to be pretty fond of a guy like that, I mean come on. I think Stanley had a certain style.
“Spielberg offered me £24,000 pounds for one sentence. The sort of advance that I would’ve got for a novel. It was a very good sentence.”
Stanley couldn’t finish A.I and in the end it came down to Spielberg. I wrote to Spielberg when he was thinking it over and said ‘I looked at my contract with Stanley, or with his lawyers, and with every turn there was this phrase ‘in perpetuity’. Oh Jesus! I’d lost all rights to that. So I wrote to Spielberg and said I had an idea how you could finish this film and it is as follows, and I told him. He wrote back immediately and said “there’s one sentence in your story I would like to buy from you and for that I will offer you — I forget it was — 12 or 24,000 pounds.” One sentence. The sort of advance that I would’ve got for a novel. It was a very good sentence. It was a sentence that tells how eventually the robot child meets the production line where other robot children just like him had been turned out. And it blows his mind. That was what Spielberg liked. Paid up immediately. Because he was already making the film. And so I am actually the only guy that has sold material to both Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
I was very happy that Stanley thought that some of them were worth preserving. There were many stories of mine that he loved and wanted to make into films, a lot of the early ones- there was one I’d written called All The World’s Tears, he thought that was terrific. But several of them yeah. He liked Science Fiction, he liked the quality of Science Fiction, he liked this boldness that it throws away the present and gives you something else, he liked that, of course he liked it, you can’t help liking it if you’ve got any intelligence, I like it. But the story you make out of it doesn’t always work.
I hope people will always be fascinated by the unknown but really the unknown includes what is in your own mind. I have had various arguments and disagreements with Science Fiction writers. They’re far too concerned with machines, not enough with actually the human predicament which is much more interesting. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, I hate the term sci-fi. Those people who like to think they’re in the know, refer to science fiction or SF as sci-fi. Now sci-fi, there are some guys I guess who even write sci fi well they do that they’re very welcome to it, I don’t do it. I do SF. Sci-fi is a slum, a nursery term it was coined by an American number one fan called Forrest Ackerman who later made public apology for coining this term, sci-fi because it makes it sound like something out of a fucking nursery.
“Science Fiction writers are far too concerned with machines, not enough with actually the human predicament, which is much more interesting.”
I still do firmly think that we actually have to go to Mars. It’s so beautiful out there in space, the rings of Saturn, the extraordinary difference of the whole thing. Homo Sapiens are only 45 million years old, it’s got a long way to go and I think that -among other things- it has to go outward because if you’re standing on Mars what are you going to think? You’re going to think differently aren’t you. It would just broaden people’s minds, change us in a way who knows we can’t tell. I’m sure they must because it is one of the dreams. I think it’s necessary. For one thing, who knows what catastrophes are going to overcome earth. How many, are there now 7 billion people? Far too many. Eventually they will be ejected the way you squeeze peas out of a pod, if indeed you do squeeze out of a pod I’ve not much experience about that I realise.
I’m too old even to go to the moon, I’m almost too old to go to Norfolk. I think that one reason to go to Mars is that Mars might seem to not have much to offer but no doubt when we get there we should be surprised about that. But, the fact is that Mars is the stepping stone to Jupiter and Saturn, in particular to Jupiter where there are 4 moons that are viable entities- Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and the other one. They are very very far away but there may be better modes of transmission later on, who knows. Even now people are being terribly resourceful in finding all sorts of ways to make a car go, it doesn’t have to be petrol, it can be hydrogen and electric. People will be using bird shit before so long.
Will A.I overtake human life? It doesn’t seem to me that you could construct a machine that would have the equivalent of a spiritual life. They wouldn’t see the need of it. And so they would be totally alien from the human race from which they sprang. Perhaps they will, I don’t know. If 50 years ago you were told they were going to develop a technique whereby they’d cut you open right by your heart and would stick something in there and seal it up again and that it was going to have a battery that would last for 8 years? Come on! There was no way in which 50 years ago you could possibly thought of a pacemaker. It’s just extraordinary how quickly that’s gone down to this little thing and now you can make these batteries that last for so long. 50 years ago you would be talking absolute balls if you posited what I’m now wearing. That’s the way life goes. I think we should be much more prepared to be surprised for these things.
I don’t do humble very well, but I think I’m modest. There was a time when I was frustrated that I was not a household name. It cut very deeply in me because I felt I had done better work than had been generally acknowledged. But I got over that, what the hell. For instance, when I got an OBE that was very good for me. In 2005 we went to Buckingham Palace and the Prince of Wales was doing this stint. I noticed — watching from the sidelines, — that he would always have someone behind him who would whisper ‘The next guy who comes on has just saved 50 lives in an aircraft t disaster and he’s lost his balls in the process and so he’s a marvellous man and he’s getting a CBE’ or whatever. So when I got in front of him he said all this about ‘You’re a distinguished career and you’ve been working for 50 years’ and so it’s my turn to say something so I say, ‘Yes Sir I’ve been getting away with it for 50 years’ and he burst out with laughter he was so used to bullshit, you know. I was very pleased with that.
“I wake up at about 3 o’clock in the morning and then I’ll go make myself a cup of tea and take it back to my bedroom and lie there in the dark drinking it, thinking and figuring out various things. Everything from the state of the universe to one’s own character. Why you do what you do.”
At the moment, I wake up at about 3 o’clock in the morning and then I’ll go make myself a cup of tea and take it back to my bedroom and lie there in the dark drinking it, thinking and figuring out various things. Everything from the state of the universe to one’s own character. Why you do what you do. I’ve actually got a bit of a clue, but it seems to me that there must be a lot of people that must wonder about themselves, why they are, how they are, and doing what they’re doing. Are they free to do that or do they have some sort of compulsion? Could be it genetic? One doesn’t know. I think that genetics suck really, it can determine certain things, but it doesn’t determine how you deal with the different intricacies of life. I think that you will never quite figure out exactly how the mind works. But I am still enjoying life tremendously at the moment. What do I have to complain about?”
In Memory of Brian Aldiss 18/8/1925 — 19/8/2017
