I have just finished reading Brian Aldiss’s autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, published in 1998. Brian Aldiss b. 1925 has long been my favorite science fiction writer. Even when I knew nothing about his life, I sensed a strong affinity with him which has to do with something about his imagination that I click into. For him as for me the outer life illustrates the inner life, not the other way around.  Imagination is paramount. His central psychological dilemma is the same as mine: dealing with parents who treated us, their children, in a cold and arbitrary way. And never understanding why they couldn’t be kind and loving.

As well, in Aldiss’s case, his growing up years, especially his experience as a foot soldier, cannon fodder in Burma, during WW II, added to his neurotic burden. 

Aldiss attended the kind of second rate “public” school that middle class English people sent their children to where he was, improbably, quite well educated because some of the masters had fine minds. Unfortunately, these schools also taught the arts of bullying and herd behavior so necessary to soldiering. Nowhere was heard the voice of conscience. No boys spoke up and said, “I say, that’s not fair. That’s poor sportsmanship. That’s wrong.” Certainly not little Brian.

As he says, life in the grimmest circumstances as a young soldier in the Far Eastin WW II was not much different from being a boy in a public school. There were compensations, however. There was the license soldiers enjoyed: to steal, to destroy, to use girls and women. He availed himself of all these opportunities. Like the poor, what the foot soldiers did did not matter, so they just got what they could out of the situation. The important thing was to station oneself as high on the pecking order as possible, and of course to stay alive.

He and his mates witnessed the ruination of the Far East during and after WW II and did their part to contribute to the chaos as well. He describes in excruciating detail the “jig-jig winter” of 46-47 in Hong Kong when hundreds and thousands of destitute young women were reduced to selling their bodies on the street for pennies. This is not the kind of noble picture of the heroic allies who saved democracy that we have grown up with. It is obvious that Aldiss and many others never really readjusted to civilian life after the absolute license of those days, in spite of the advantages they enjoyed in the prosperous post-war years.

Aldiss also picked up the habit of heavy drinking and became a “working alcoholic,” that is, a person who can remain functional at high levels of alcohol consumption. Oh, yes, and there is his sex addiction. His writing gives me a good picture of a man who has inhabited his time in the most intimate way, “seen the world.” I do not like his morals much, and his sexism is of the type that leaves the women in his story (and in his life, I suppose) with very little agency. This does not mean he did not love his wives and children, of course. In the U.S. we have de-glamorized alcoholism and sex addiction, but Aldiss sees these traits of his as the wellspring of his creativity. I take no sides, except that I think the real source of his excellence is in the lonely hours of boyhood that he spent reading and thinking.

His heroes seemingly have no internal life, or at best an internal life that lacks clarity. They do not understand themselves. Other characters are known only by their behavior. People work, play,  observe, experience, muse and reflect, but they do not think much, nor, would I say, do they feel very strongly. Depression stalks them.

So what is it about his work that haunts me? Here is a short list. Its variety, its visual power, good stories, action and adventure, realism and plausibility even in the strangest circumstances, constant authorial “presence,” sense of dialoguing with the reader, philosophical and social content, humor. At his best, brilliance.

Many critics have complained about much of his work seeming careless or unfinished, and that’s true enough, but his best work is top drawer. For me in the end it is his imagination that reigns supreme.

A good place to begin with Aldiss is to read his early books, Hothouse and Non-Stop.  If you like these you might want to go on reading.

His short work, Supertoys Last All Summer Long was adapted as the basis for Stephen Spielberg’s film, AI. Aldiss's verdict on  the film was that it was "crap," but I thought it was a pretty good remake of Walt Disney's Pinocchio.Of course I hated Pinocchio. Oh well.   

You can read  Supertoys  here in its entirety.

Comments

[Brandon]

Speaking of British sci-fi authors, J.G. Ballard was born just a few years after Aldiss and Spielberg adapted his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun into a movie in 1987. I've read Hello America, and I wonder if the works of Aldiss and Ballard would complement each other if read together.

[Hattie]

Aldiss's roots are in the romantic and Victorian realms. If these are not your favorite periods in literature, you perhaps will not like his work. I said above that he gives little agency to women, but that is not exactly correct. I think it's more that he traps his heroines in contingency, which, after all, is true to life. He says that the first science fiction novel was Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein.* He wrote a book, *Frankenstein Unbound,* which was made into a ho-hum movie. He believes that real SF is always plausible no matter how strange it seems. I will read a Ballard novel and see whether his work meets that criterion. Oh, and he is definitely British, not at all American, so I think some knowledge of the peculiarities of British life and literature are helpful in understanding his work.
More: This snippit from Wordsworth's Preludes is the kind of thing Aldiss was raised on:

. . . for I had an eye
Which in my strongest workings evermore
Was looking for the shades of difference
As they lie hid in all exterior forms,
Near or remote, minute or vast--an eye
Which from a stone, a tree, a withered leaf,
To the broad ocean and the azure heavens
Spangled with kindred multitudes of stars,
Could find no surface where its power might sleep,
Which spake perpetual logic to my soul
(III, 156-66)
The death of nature is one of Aldiss's themes. Without these externals of nature to engage the eye, logic becomes mechanical and unfulfilling. It becomes one dimensional instead of ever-varying. In many places today there is very little of the natural world left.
Thanks, as always, Brandon, for your intelligent comments.

[Brandon]

I heard of Ballard from "Ecology of Fear," particularly the chapter on fictional destructions of Los Angeles. Of course, I saw "Empire of the Sun" years before having heard of Ballard.