brian aldiss

Brian Wilson Aldiss OBE pen names: Jael Cracken, Dr. Peristyle and C. C. Shackleton. born Norfolk, England: 18 August 1925 died Oxford, England: 19 August 2017 Brian W. Aldiss was an English author, artist, and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels, short fiction and short...

A short story about sentient, but not particularly intelligent, office machines making a trek across a post-apocalyptic desert. Probably from the mid to late sixties, or maybe early seventies. I thought it may be from a Spectrum anthology, but I can't seem to find it. I seem to remember a...

I first read this trilogy as the books were being published in the early 1980s. Recently, I re-read them. Chronners may know that I think of this work at the top of the SF tree, though it's not perfect. Yet for vision, grandeur, inventiveness and audacity there's nothing really to match it...

Cryptozoic - Brian Aldiss Cryptozoic (1967) is an early Brain Aldiss book, written in the height of the 'new wave' of British SF, when demonstrating how clever you were as an author seemed to be important. It's an interesting read, not because it's very good (it isn't) but because it manages...

Starswarm is a story of the fate of future mankind, who has left Earth for space, their descendants now living within the Starswarm. Starswarm is divided into Sectors (Sector Vermilion, Sector Green etc.) and each of these forms a connecting Prologue, in italics, to each story, to make the whole...

Hello all, I've been trying unsuccessfully to remember the name of a short story I read in an SF compilation back in the 70s or early 80s. It stuck in my mind due to its unusual nature and elegaic atmosphere. In the story, to the best of my recollection, beings on some other planet were able to...

Space ship returns to Earth orbit from mission. Somehow their time shifted and everybody moves and lives much faster than people on Earth. They can't land until this is solved. They don't even know that they are back yet. Few scientists from Earth enter the spaceship, those who are considered...

Short story, probably Sixties. Robot train goes by farm, calling out that humans are extinct. Robots on farm discuss humans, conclude that humans were inferior because they had instincts. Robot train goes by again, calling out that there are a few humans left after all. A little later an...

Hi I’m looking for a sci fi short story book all I can remember is one story has the last remaining humans on a space ship aliens make contact and say how dangerous could so few humans be to such a threat to a superior race ‘little did they know. Another story tells how man adapted every power...

I'll put this question in a spoiler in case there are readers who have not read Helliconia Winter...

Read this book on the weekend. Published 1958. Very good story. Recommended. Couldn't help but think of that Canadian science fiction TV series "The Starlost" while reading this book. Ah, if only that TV show could have been anywhere near the quality of Non-Stop. I saw it again last year on...

Hi everyone, I’m looking for a sci-fI novel... Media - soft cover novel Original year - I read it in paperback sometime between 1982 and 1986 Major theme - post-apocalyptic novel based in Europe (Italy, France and UK?) several years after a war that involved chemical warfare using psychotropic...

When on holidays, I'll often pop into any used book store that I come across for a quick peek at the science fiction shelves. I recently came away from one store with a collection of short stories by Brian Aldiss called Starswarm, and two copies of Asimovs Science Fiction (Feb 2013 & Oct/Nov...

I read this book in the 80s, a paperback off my parents’ bookshelf, so I assume it was 1960s era. I can remember how it was set up, but as the story evolved the characters find an overgrown forest, (and I think the hull of the ship?) They find out that the forest is overgrown hydroponics, that...

After a few decades, I finally re-read "The Saliva Tree", Brian Aldiss's homage to H. G. Wells. This novella, first appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Nov 1965), seamlessly combines many elements of the first few years of the Wells canon. The Island of Dr. Moreau, The...

SF legend Brian Aldiss has died. Brian Aldiss dies aged 92 | The Bookseller

This is a collection of 12 stories by numerous authors writing in the 1950s, the book itself published in 1961 (my copy is dated 1965) Link to the blog: Open the pod-bay doors...: Penguin Science Fiction ed. by Brian Aldiss Sole Solution, Eric Frank Russell A very short story, just 3 pages...

Thinking about creepy tales and this short story popped up. Read it early seventies but I think it was written in sixties. Three or four couples meet up in a high apartment for annual christmas eve party. They sit chatting while having cocktails and can of peas. It slowly transpires that each...

Here is an excerpt from Gustav Krist's Alone Through the Forbidden Land (English translation by Lorimer, 1939): ---If you want to brew it [tarantula schnapps] you catch a number of poisonous spiders, put them in a glass, and throw in some scraps of dried apples or apricots. The furious brutes...

This rather odd little 1970 Corgi anthology (previously published by Allison & Busby in 1969) consists of three novellas by famous authors, without any editorial foreward to explain them, just a few portenteous phrases on the cover about eerie worlds and strange landscapes in which man himself...