Science fiction writer Brian Aldiss has died just after turning 92.
Aldiss was an acquaintance rather than a friend. I got him to sign things at the two UK Worldcons I attended (2005 in Glasgow and 2014 in London), and we may have talked briefly at other Worldcons; I don’t actually remember.
He was an extremely important, but also extremely variable, writer. His good stuff was really good, but his bad stuff was really bad. When I brought him a copy of Cracken at Critical to sign, he said “Oh God, this piece of crap!” Highpoints include Nonstop and “The Saliva Tree.” He was much admired by a wide range of science fiction’s best talents, including Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock and Bruce Sterling (the latter of whom I bought an Aldiss chapbooks off of when he was culling his library).
Lacking much in the way of additional personal contact to pad out this obituary, here are some of the Brian Aldiss items in my own collection.
As far as I can tell, The Rose Press did this and Avram Davidson’s The Scarlet Fig, and then fell off the map…
That’s not everything I own by Aldiss, but I’m far from having a complete Aldiss collection. The man was extremely prolific…