Brian Aldiss: 'These days I don't read any science fiction. I only read Tolstoy' (original) (raw)

There is something curiously appropriate about Brian Aldiss, the Grand Old Man of British science fiction, living in Headington, a village now absorbed into Oxford. So he lives in Oxford, but not in Oxford; just as he is in the canon – he has recently been republished as a Penguin modern classic – but, as a writer of speculative fiction, excluded from the literary mainstream. "There's a certain lowliness about Headington," he tells me, with a chuckle.

A wry and spry 88 years old, Aldiss has written almost every day since he was 14, and has just seen his entire backlist republished by HarperCollins's digital Friday Project – "the Friday whatnot" as he refers to it – alongside a new novel. Not only is Aldiss one of the most significant writers of speculative fiction – his story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" was the basis for Spielberg's AI, and the novels Hothouse, Report on Probability A and Non-Stop vastly expanded the moral universe of the genre – few writers have contributed more. And by means of his Penguin SF anthologies and The Billion Year Spree – his history of science fiction latterly revised as The Trillion Year Spree – Aldiss gave both intellectual rigour and critical nuance to the idea of science fiction.

The new novel, Comfort Zone, is not science fiction. It has elements of Jane Gardam's Old Filth – tetchy elderly people dealing with the ignominy of ageing – coupled with social commentary, dealing with, among other things, the war in Iraq, female genital mutilation and a plan to build a mosque in Headington. This reminds me of HG Wells and the odd appearance of a mosque in War of the Worlds – the Martians blow one up in Woking.

No social realist writer thought to note the appearance of one of the first mosques in Britain. Do SF writers have, as it were, slightly more sensitive antennae to changes in society? "Is that the case? I have to admit to you these days I don't read any science fiction – or do I? Now I only read Tolstoy. It seems to me that Tolstoy with his marvellous, imperial objection to many of the things that were going on, his loathing of the behaviour of the church for one thing, the government for another – well, he put himself in a degree of peril. But nevertheless his popularity was a defence for him. Would I like to be a writer like that? Well I would love to be able to write like that but I wouldn't want to actually to have been Tolstoy. Resurrection is the novel I most like, and it's made me give up meat. I've become a vegetarian because I am persuaded that Tolstoy was right: one shouldn't kill animals."

When we return to ageing, Aldiss is wonderfully optimistic. "I've had a couple of very interesting trips to the local hospital. The John Radcliffe being across the road is terribly convenient. I had a heart attack so they whipped me in there. I've had two stays recently."

At the mention of Greybeard, a novel he wrote 39 years ago in which humanity is ageing and unable to procreate, he swiftly moves from its obvious theme to a more personal recollection. "Greybeard was not about old age, it was about the fact that my first marriage had broken up and my children had been taken away from me. They had gone with their mother to the Isle of Wight and I was bereft. I went and lived in one room in Paradise Square in Sheffield – Paradise Square hardly exists now, but was then a well‑known slum. I was 40 and had been reduced to living in one room and above all I feared I had lost those dear children. As I wrote Greybeard, I thought no one's going to read this, it's far too miserable but it seems I didn't know much about the world because it was rather successful. Extraordinary."

Like his previous novel,the SF Finches of Mars, Comfort Zone is sceptical about religion. Aldiss is clear on the point. "I can't believe that there's some extraordinary creature that watches over us. It must have been a prehistoric invention. I have a wonderful book here from a V&A exhibition about Chinese painting from the year 700 onwards. They were interested in metaphysical aspects of the world but they are not bugged by a great redeemer – not loaded down with some terrible, terrible visionary being up there."

It was the second world war, which began when he was 14, that made him a science fiction writer. "When I came back after some years in the army in the far east, I was detached from everything. I couldn't do family life any more. My return to England was celebrated by bread going on ration, so that there was nothing really to engender my affection for the country." Having been in Sumatra, China and India, writing was an escape from the drab and dingy Britain to which Aldiss returned. "I had written when I was at school: two hardcover volumes of The Adventures of Whip Donovan Among the Planets – extraordinarily enough those two volumes turned up in the Bodleian Library a couple of years ago. They had survived everything, the war, the cold war, there they were with my illustrations in them. I don't know now what the stories are like, but certainly the watercolour illustrations are really rather fun. And so eventually my nice publishers who are publishing everything I ever wrote – what are they called again, the Friday Dilemma? – will do a limited, unedited version of Whip Donovan. Fancy! I was 14 when I wrote that."

Eventually Aldiss was approached by the Faber editor Charles Monteith and Non-Stop, his first novel, was published in 1958. He says that, coincidentally, both he and Monteith had "subscribed to the journal called Modern Boy when we were boys and it was far superior to Champion and Hotspur and all the other drivelling boys' magazines at the time. Indeed it shaped our position, I believe, with regards to stories because the stories in Modern Boy were often set in, shall we say, the South Seas, or there'd be a science fiction story or stories about motor racing and so on. The other thing we had in common was the fact that we had both been in Burma fighting the Japanese."

It's a standard question, but I wondered which novels Aldiss was most proud of and which had been unfairly neglected. "Of course almost every one is neglected and misunderstood by the critics!" he laughs. "But, for instance, I did four volumes of social commentary – about the end of the cold war –that weren't really SF. Those were never published by one publisher. They could never be seen as a quartet. It was only Anthony Burgess who had the energy to seek them out [the Squire quartet] and treat them as such." But the best work will surprise no one. "I most like the Helliconia books" – from the early 1980s (novels that dramatically attempt to tell the history of an entire civilisation, and feature a planet where the seasons are aeons long) – "because I worked very hard on them. Two years doing nothing but asking questions! The advantage of living in Oxford is you can knock on any old door and the cobwebs depart as the door opens and there is someone who knows everything about how you do so and so. Lunching with the then‑president of one college who had written a history of the world, I had to ask him if a civilisation would survive 5,000 years and he gave me a very suitable answer: it depends."

As with JG Ballard and Burgess, the experience of the colonies and the east has left an indelible mark on Aldiss. "There's no doubt that those of us who'd been in the far east had a different view of life. That has certainly shaped me, even though I haven't written about the east per se. I'd find that rather hard to do." Why? He pauses for a long time. "Because – well, I don't know why. I have to admit to a whole lot of shame that went on. One was an adolescent."

On the train back home, I reread Non-Stop and am struck by the description of the hunters in the "jungle, where the flies are ubiquitous and the heat unbearable", and wonder whether or not, actually, every one of his books has been about that time in some way. In Non-Stop, the protagonist, Complain, says he doesn't want Paradise, just a choice of where he suffers. Headington, it transpires, is a curiously benevolent Purgatory.