Rather presumptuously, about two years ago I contacted the great man via his website suggesting that he might be able to help me, and directing him to the Lights in the sky opener, serialised on this website. I acknowledged my debt to him and the role Billion Year Spree played in my autodidactic study of imaginative literature, leading eventually to my writing it!

Whether he ever got to read the message I don’t know, but somehow I doubt it, assuming it to have been intercepted by one of the gatekeepers supervising his website, but I never received an answer…

Like a lot of SF fans of my generation I came to Brian Aldiss through the short story collection Space, Time and Nathaniel, before moving on, to The Dark Light Years, Cryptozoic, and eventually Hothouse! Aldiss was clearly a better writer (in purely literary terms), than my other favourite of the period, Philip K Dick (as he would prove with the incomparable Helliconia Trilogy), but stylistically he now seems to belong to another age.  The films made from his stories weren’t that successful and are now never shown (with sole exception of A.I., made from his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long), and fit much less well with the anxiety-ridden postmodernist world we find ourselves in , a milieu that Dick inhabits perfectly, and appeared to anticipate!

His SF scholarship tried (unsuccessfully) to force the literary world to take the form seriously, but in vain, and Billion (later Trillion) Year Spree’s only real fault is that it contains no appreciation of his own work!

R.I.P. then, Brian…

C.E. Stevens  August 2017