Brian Aldiss Passes

Brian Aldiss, the last great Grand Master of the SF's Golden Age, passed away this weekend.

One of the first hardback novels I ever owned was Brian Aldiss' first novel, Non-Stop, published in 1958. It is a slim volume with a massive starship on the cover. It was an early publication of the Science Fiction Book Club, a subscription service which sent (and still sends) hardback editions of SF and Fantasy books monthly.

At the time it came to me, in its cardboard box mailer, it was hard to find good SF. My choices were basically the book club or the drugstore across from my church, where I could purchase Ace Doubles, back-to-back paperback books in wire racks. Every month I awaited the arrival of the book club book, and getting Non-Stop is one of the highlights of my teenage reading life.

Non-Stop is a slim book, and its hero, Roy Complain, is very British for the descendant of passengers in the 23rd generation of a ship that made a trip to the star Procyon, a trip that should have taken them only six generations to accomplish. Things have gone wrong. Most of the people living aboard have forgotten their history and don't realize they're living on a ship traveling through space.

The plot involves Complain roaming around the immense ship and discovering the various peoples who live there and getting involved in their conflicts. Gradually the ship is described and eventually we discover what's happening to it and the fate of the passengers, which I will not describe for fear of spoiling the ending for you.

What I want to point out is not Aldiss' plot in Non-Stop, but his voice for describing and creating a vivid fictional world for his readers.  In my then-young mind, I could visualize the world of the ship through the poetry of his description, where the golden age of space travel and discovery had somehow gone awry. In subsequent novels and stories, his storytelling improved, but his ability to create vivid worlds was strong in Non-Stop and never waned in his other work, like the amazing Helliconia Trilogy. His end-of-the-Solar-System novel, The Long Afternoon of Earth, contains imagery of the demise of Earth and the devolved remains its human population that is reminiscent of and likely a tribute to H. G. Wells' novel The Time Traveler.

His writing bridged the golden age of stand-alone novels like Non-Stop, and today's series-mad marketing with Helliconia, published as a trilogy. He wrote many good short stories as well, including his famous "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," which became the movie "AI." He also wrote non-fiction, including The Billion Year Spree, a history of SF. He was an admirer of the classic science fiction of H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley and wrote sequels to some of their work. He edited volumes of the best of science fiction stories. He wrote travelogues and published poetry.

He was tremendously imaginative and productive, publishing good work into his eighties.  We will miss his poetic voice and his ability to create unique worlds in the style of classic greats like Wells and Shelley, in whose company he would be comfortable.