Dr Amicus wrote:
antnield wrote:
A huge loss, one of the key figures in post-war British Science Fiction not only as an author but as a critic, historian and anthologist.
The Helliconia Trilogy was one of my favourites as a teenager, with
Hothouse,
Frankenstein Unbound and
Non-Stop as later discoveries. His history of SF,
Billion (Trillion) Year Spree, is also a great, hugely entertaining read.
Incidentally, as at last night certainly, many of his books are available on the Kindle for a very low price.
hearthesilence wrote:
"Supertoys Last All Summer Long" can be read at Aldiss's own site. This, of course, was developed by Stanley Kubrick into
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
The recent passing of Brian Aldiss prompted me to go back for yet another re-viewing of one of my favourite documentary series as a teenager, the three part New Nightmares series, which accompanied the "Movie Nightmares" season on Channel 4 back in 1993. This took a different topic each episode and used interviews with scientists and science fiction authors (with wonderful readings from their books), stock footage, film clips (from films in the accompanying series) and dramatised parts in a great manner. There are lots of interviews with authors who have sadly passed on over the years including Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, Michael Critchton, John Brunner, Kurt Vonnegut, etc (there's even a brief clip from Robin Williams Live At The Met, when he was doing 'edgy' environmentalist stand up!)
I also did a check on YouTube and whilst the first episode "Man-Machine" isn't on there (which traces the developments of artificial intelligence in science and fiction from Alan Turing, through Crash and plastic surgery, and into virtual reality and Neuromancer), the other two episodes are. The second episode is the environmental/genetics one,
"Nature Says No" which Brian Aldiss features the most in (I love his praise for Greg Bear's Blood Music, and he gets the touching final moments of the episode too). And the third episode,
"Them!", is about the fear of the 'other' from other races to aliens, to political ideas and the nature of crowds.
Even 24 years on I still find myself coming back to the episodes, if just to hear the readings from the novels!