Brian Aldiss
Brian W. Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss is one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999. Brian Aldiss recently celebrated his eightieth birthday and is still writing to ardent applause.
Helliconia


Helliconia Spring
Berkey, 1983

Helliconia Summer
Tim Gill
   
Helliconia Winter
Barclay Shaw

Helliconia
Peter Goodfellow

Helliconia Spring
A planet orbiting binary suns, Helliconia has a Great Year spanning three millennia of Earth time: cultures are born in spring, flourish in summer, then die with the onset of the generations-long winter. Helliconia is emerging from its centuries-long winter. The tribes of the equatorial continent emerge from their hiding places and are again able to dispute possession of the planet with the ferocious phagors. In Oldorando, love, trade and coinage are being redisovered . . .
Helliconia Summer
Helliconia Summer takes place in six months and shows us most of the extraordinary planet Helliconia, from the circumpolar regions of Sibornal to the salable glaciers of Hespagorat.
We meet Billy Xiao Pin, who comes to Helliconia from a different world -- one that still dreams of distant Earth. And we meet the embattled king of Borlien, who, beset by enemies, trusting none but his phagor guard, decides to divorce his beautiful queen and marry instead the child princess of Oldorando. His struggle to do so, while his foes, sensing his weakness, encircle him, forms the plot of this novel, while in the background the Helliconia forests burn.
Helliconia Winter
On Helliconia, where one year lasts two and a half thousand earth years and winter is seven centuries long, snow is falling. As Helliconia moves on its elliptical path away from the warmth of the sun Freyr, crops fail; and the growing harshness of the climate is matched by the harshness of government under the Oligarch. Now too, mankind's ancient enemies, the phagors, begin to lear their mountain fastnesses to war upon human civilization.
Here is a magical story of journeys, strange transformations, and the world of events that paralyze or alter the lives of men and women. It is the story of a great battle, whose victors are betrayed and exterminated. The story of a beautiful woman who falls into the hands of her husband's slayer. The story of Luterin Shokerandit, who undertakes a pilgrimage of breathtaking peril through the gathering winter to the farthest polar reaches of the planet, and enters the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar, where the prisoners of the Wheel are believed to row their planet back to light. Involved in this drama are other dimensions: the world of the dead; distant Earth -- also undergoing winter -- and the dieties that preside over the life of both planets.
Helliconia
Helliconia Spring
Helliconia Summer
Helliconia Winter
Squire Quartet


Life in the West

Forgotten Life

Remembrance Day

Somewhere East of Life

Life in the West
Thomas C. Squire, founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, former secret agent and successful hedonist faces a midlife crisis that undermines the stability of his ancestral home. At a conference in Sicily, he becomes involved with the lovely if calculating Selina and the Russian, Vasily.
Forgotten Life
When Clement Winter's brother dies, he inherits the much-admired yet distant sibling's papers. Confronting the revelations, fears and aspirations, he tries to assimilate and understand his dead brother's life, as unexpected upheavals remind him how little he understands his own.
Remembrance Day
Dominic is a computer wizard worth millions though only in his 20s. He is unhappily married to an older woman and both of them are scarred from their childhoods. Eventually conceding to divorce, Dominic leaves his business to buy and manage a small coastal hotel.
Somewhere East of Life
Having abandoned Britain in the recession, architectural historian Roy operates from Germany, listing the world's gems threatened by war. But someone has stolen a chunk of his memory - ten years - with the salacious parts sold on as porn. He travels the globe hoping to find his lost years.

The Year Before Yesterday


Vanguard from Alpha/Equator
Tim White

The Year Before Yesterday/Cracken at Critical
Ray Lago

Vanguard from Alpha/Equator
The spy team from Earth knew they were looking for trouble when they secretly landed in Luna Area 101 - dangerous Rosk territory. But the fearless trio got more than they bargained for at the hands of these hostile guests of Earth.
Tyne and Murray escaped with their lives. The third man was dead, and Tyne suspected that Murray had murdered him in cold blood.
Ready to confront him with his charge, Tyne discovered that Murray had disappeared somewhere in the banned area. But when he followed him, he discovered something vastly more dangerous than Murray's guilt or innocence -the Rosks threatened imminent invasion of Earth. And only Tyne now held the secret that could deflect their hordes of death.
The Year Before Yesterday/Cracken at Critical
All over the world corrupt dictatorships and fascist regimes have seized power - except in the Scandinavian countries. Here, in obscurity, an enclave of freedom still survives. But which Scandinavia are we talking about, and in which world?
The moon has been colonized, and crucial events under the airtight domes may yet revolutionize the lives of people on Earth. But which moon is this, and who are these people?
Global corporations are building a stratified utopia when the homeless invaders arrive. The invaders are offered a share of utopia; but what kind of gift is it, and what exactly are these invaders?
Novels


Non-Stop/Starship
Fred Gambino

Bow Down to Nul/Interpreter
Ed Emshwiller

The Primal Urge
David Davies

Hothouse
Tim White

Greybeard
Tim White

The Dark Light Years
Bruce Pennington

Earthworks
Bruce Pennington

An Age/Cryptozoic!
Mark Salwowski

Report on Probability A
Steve Savage

Barefoot in the Head
Mark Salwowski

Frankenstein Unbound
Jim Burns

The Eighty-Minute Hour: A Space Opera
Chris Foss

The Malacia Tapestry
Ron Walotsky

Enemies of the System
Peter Goodfellow

Moreau's Other Island/An Island Called Moreau
Tim White

Dracula Unbound
Chris Foss

White Mars w/Roger Penrose

Super-State

Sanity and the Lady

HARM
Tifenn Python

Non-Stop/Starship
Here is an adventure story complete with such traditional ingredients as a lost tribe, sinister traces of a mighty former civilisation, and a hero, Roy Complain, who, purged by peril, comes eventually to find himself. But these classic ingredients have undergone a romantic metamorphosis: no tribe has ever been more thoroughly lost than the Greene tribe, and when Roy Complain and Priest Marapper set our for the fabled region called Forwards, they are heading for a series of shocks which will surprise the most hardened reader. For this is science fiction at its best, a realm where the logical happening is the unexpected one.
Bow Down to Nul/Interpreter
When Earthman Gary Towler is off work, he is a pariah. For his task as chief interpretor for the corrupt and tyrannical nuls makes other humans avoid him as a traitor. Nor is he trusted by the three-armed mammoth rulers themselves, especially when they learned that an envoy was on the way from their distant planetary headquarters to investigate charges of corruption on Earth. For the leaders realized that Gary knew too much. When the humans leading the underground rebellion demanded Gary's aid or his life, he was caught between two untrustful forces. And his only way out was to make himself into a one-man third force against two worlds' plotters.
The Primal Urge
If reticence is a feature reserved for the British, what would possess well bred, reserved, thoroughly 'British', James Solent, to dash off for a night of reckless passion with a complete stranger? The answer is a gadget - an Emotional Register that prevents anyone from hiding any sexual attraction they feel for anyone else. Find out what happens to Britain and the rest of the world when this mechanical marvel sinks its teeth into the restrained status quo.
Hothouse
The Sun is about to go Nova. Earth and Moon have ceased their axial rotation and present one face continuously to the sun. The bright side of Earth is covered with carnivorous forest. This is the Age of vegetables. Gren and his lady - not to mention the tummybelly men - journey to the even more terrifying Dark side.
Greybeard
The sombre story of a group of people in their fifties who face the fact that there is no younger generation coming to replace them; instead nature is rushing back to obliterate the disaster they have brought on theselves.
The Dark Light Years
The year was 2035 when, for the first time in the history of space exploration, humankind encountered a race of intelligent beings on another world. A peaceful and defenseless race, the Utod became helpless victims of Man's rapacious greed and random violence. In an attempt to learn their language, Aylmer Ainson marooned himself on their home world, Dapdrof. Now, forty years later, a human ship has come to "rescue" him, to carry him home to a world he has almost forgotten, and one that has undergone cataclysmic changes...
Earthworks
Africa is the last frontier in a starving and overpopulated world. A world gone dry. A world of horror where literacy and thought are for machines only. Where cities are beehives built on stilts to protect them from the chemicals which grow crops. Where penal institutions are collective farms. Where petty infractions condemn men to work for the rest of their lives alongside robots tilling the dead soil. The world is a place where corpses stalk the earth, for there is no longer room in the ground.
Africa is the last hope for Knowle Noland. He has escaped the farms, wrecked a ship, and fled The System only to encounter Peter Mercator, an old oppressor with new ideas--and Justine, a complex and mysterious femme fatale who equates annihiliation with salvation... And she wants Knowle Noland to fire the shot which will plunge the world into chaos.
An Age/Cryptozoic!
Bush materialised in the prehistoric shore... and the drama began.
For Bush was a mind-traveller, moving through time like a phantom... and haunted by a phantom, The Dark Woman. Was she a ghost from his future, or the product of a mind strained beyond endurance? Bush had other problems: emerging from the Devonian past into a totalitarian future he was trained to kill, sent back in time to assassinate a man who threatened the future.
Report on Probability A
One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir. " Within the house moved a woman, the strangely fascinating Mrs. Mary: without, a black and white cat stalked the pigeon known as X. The characters G, S, and C watched from various outbuildings. Others watched them and yet others watched those watchers. An enigmatic engraving hung in each outbuilding and as the early dusk fell C gazed at a representation of two snakes, each swallowing the other's tail.
Barefoot in the Head
When an undeclared Acid Head War breaks out, Britain is the first to be devastated by Psycho-Chemical Aerosols - tasteless, odourless, colourless psychedelic drugs, which distort the minds of thousands of civilians into extreme terror or extreme joy. When the warped citizens of Europe proclaim Colin Charteris their hero, he finds himself leading an unfathomable crusade in a devastated world.
Frankenstein Unbound
When Joe Bodenland is suddenly transported back in time to the year 1816, his first reaction is of eager curiosity rather than distress. Certainly the Switzerland in which he finds himself, with its charming country inns, breathtaking landscapes and gentle, unmechanized pace of life, is infinitely preferable to the America of 2020 where the games of politicians threaten total annihilation. But after meeting the brooding young Victor Frankenstein, Joe realises that this world is more complex than the one he left behind. Is Frankenstein real, or are both Joe and he living out fictional lives?
The Eighty-Minute Hour: A Space Opera
A slightly bizarre science fiction story set in a period when the Solar system, while experiencing a political-economic linking of capitalism and communism, England's sinking into the sea, and the perfection of birth control, becomes steeped in a dramatic free will/determinism dispute.
The Malacia Tapestry
Jostling through the light and shadow of Malacia's streets goes a crowd of people: dukes, merchants, actresses, priests, courtesans, spongers, soldiers and down-at-heel showmen. They are seen through the eyes of Perian de Chirolo, actor and adventurer, whose experiences take him into the heart of Malacia's darkest secrets. And behind the drama stands the enigma of Malacia itself. An age-old city-state where change is forbidden, lingering under the spell of its magicians...
Enemies of the System
In his electrifying new novel, Brian Aldiss transports his readers one million years into the future - into the company of a utopian race called homo uniformis: Man Alike Throughout. Supremely logical, their thoguhts controlled by a centralized nervous system, these utopianists are freed by a beneficial design called Biocom from the emotional problems and absurd evolutionary flaws which have always plagued homo sapiens.
Moreau's Other Island/An Island Called Moreau
In the early months of war in 1996, the space capsule Ledais sabotaged on its return trip from the moon, killing one person on impact and leaving three to drift in a liferaft in the middle of the Pacific. Only one of these - U. S. Under-Secretary of State, Calvert Madle Roberts - survives to see the cliffs of an island dominated by a huge letter M.
The appearance of this island's inhabitants comes a a considerable shock to Roberts - though human, they are disfigured by bizarre forms of bestiality so that it is almost impossible to say whether they are human or animal. The sinister genius responsible for their condition is Mortimer Dart, a thalidomide victim whose fascination for human deformity has led to a series of experiments duplicating those of H. G. Wells's legendary Dr. Moreau. That, at least, is how they began.
Dracula Unbound
In the barren dust of the far future, the sun leaks energy in a darkening sky and the only remaining humans are imprisoned by spectral, bloodthirsty beings. Back in the brilliant Utah sunlight of 1999, two ancient graves yield evidence that a species of human coexisted with the dinosaurs . . . Linking these scenarios is impetuous inventor Joe Bodenland, who has just created a machine that manipulates time to dispose of hazardous waste . . .
White Mars w/Roger Penrose
Halfway through the 21st century, an organization with members from each industrialized nation has found a way to colonize Mars. Owing to Earth's economic collapse, the colony is cut off from the mother planet. The head of the colony wants to create Utopia - some, however, want to go home.
Super-State
"Super-State" is the Europe of 40 years' time where, despite technological advancement, the basic questions of life have yet to be answered by either philosophers or scientists and a subversive group, the "Insanatics", is sending out doleful messages to worry and provoke the population.
Sanity and the Lady
"They're the reason why xenophobia was invented." So says Uncle Toby, renegade member of the Laurence family. The comfortable Laurence family lead a fairly traditional life. They have a manservant to look after them. The sea is nearby, as is the psychotherapist. Edgar Laurence is a well-known pianist. His grand-daughter, Laura Broughton, is a famous novelist. Of course, the family has its problems. There's an unmarried mother with a small child. There are mobs at the gates, divorces, illicit love affairs and a suicide - or is that two suicides? But life goes on. Until the night when a meteorite burns out in earth's atmosphere. It releases a number of microscopic beings. Well, if not beings, at least functions. They are a mystery, a challenge to human imagination. However, if you have one entering your brain, you may be able to communicate with it, perhaps to your advantage. Here is what humans have long wanted, a chance to study alien life. They do not like it when they get it. Laura Broughton defends the visitors while the world becomes more and more alarmed. That's what gets her into trouble. And finally, the visitors astonish us all.
HARM
The time is today or tomorrow - or perhaps the day after tomorrow. Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali, a young British citizen of Muslim descent, has written a satirical novel in which two characters joke about the assassination of the prime minister. Arrested by agents of HARM - the Hostile Activities Research Ministry - Paul is thrown into a nameless Abu Ghraib-like prison, possibly located in Syria, where he is held incommunicado and brutally interrogated by jailers to whom his Muslim heritage is itself a crime meriting the harshest punishment. Under this sadistic regime, Paul's personality begins to show signs of radical fragmentation. . . .
On the remote planet of Stygia, a man named Fremant, haunted by memories of torture that seem drawn from Paul's mind, is one of a small group of colonists struggling for survival on a harsh but weirdly beautiful world whose dominant life-forms are insects. The sole humanoid race on the planet has been hunted to extinction by the human settlers, whose long journey to Stygia has left them unable to understand their own history and technology.
Thrown back to a more primitive state, they seem destined to repeat all the sins of the world they fled to Stygia to escape.
Is Paul dreaming Fremant as a way of escaping the horrors of his imprisonment? Or is there a stronger - and far stranger - connection between the two men, whose very different circumstances begin to take on uncanny parallels?
As aspects of their identities blur and, finally, merge, astonishing answers take shape - and profound new questions arise.
Additional Cover Art
Collections


Space, Time and Nathaniel
Bruce Pennington

The Canopy of Time
Bruce Pennington

No Time Like Tomorrow
Richard Powers

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand
Vincent diFate

Equator/Equator and Segregation
Bruce Pennington

The Airs of Earth
Bruce Pennington

Starswarm
Vincent diFate

The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths/The Saliva Tree
David Davies

Intangibles Inc. and Other Stories
Michael Farrell

The Moment of Eclipse

Neanderthal Planet
Don Ivan Punchatz

The Book of Brian Aldiss
Karel Thole

Last Orders and Other Stories
Peter Goodfellow

New Arrivals, Old Encounters
Tim White
 
Brothers of the Head and Where the Lines Converge
Mark Salwowski

Foreign Bodies

Seasons in Flight
John Harris

The Magic of the Past

A Tupolev Too Far
Fred Gambino

The Secret of This Book

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

Cultural Breaks
John Picacio

Space, Time and Nathaniel
T
Our Kind of Knowledge
Conviction
Not for an Age
The Shubshub Race
Criminal Record
The Failed Men
Supercity
There Is a Tide
Pogsmith
Outside
Panel Game
Dumb Show
The Canopy of Time
Three's a Cloud
All the World's Tears
Who Can Replace a Man?
Blighted Profile
Judas Dancing
O Ishrail!
Incentive
Gene Hive
Secret of a Mighty City
They Shall Inherit
Visiting Amoeba
No Time Like Tomorrow
T
Not for an Age
Poor Little Warrior!
The Failed Men
Carrion Country
Judas Danced
Psyclops
Outside
Gesture of Farewell
The New Father Christmas
Blighted Profile
Our Kind of Knowledge
Galaxies Like Grains of Sand
untitled
Out of Reach
The War Millennia
The Sterile Millennia
All the World's Tears
The Robot Millennia
Who Can Replace a Man?
The Mingled Millennia
Blighted Profile
The Dark Millennia
O Ishrail!
The Star Millennia
Incentive
Gene-Hive
The Megalopolis Millenn
Secret of a Mighty City
The Ultimate Millennia
Visiting Amoeba
Equator/Equator and Segregation
Equator
Segregation
The Airs of Earth
A Kind of Artistry
How to Be a Soldier
Basis for Negotiation
Shards
"O Moon of My Delight!"
The International Smile
The Game of God
Old Hundredth
Starswarm
Sector Vermilion
Sector Grey
Hearts and Engines
Sector Violet
The Underprivileged
Sector Diamond
The Game of God
Sector Green
Shards
Sector Yellow
Legends of Smith's Burst
Sector Azure
O Moon of My Delight
The Rift
Old Hundredth
The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths/The Saliva Tree
The Saliva Tree
Danger: Religion!
The Source
The Lonely Habit
A Pleasure Shared
One Role With Relish
Legends of Smith's Burst
The Day of the Doomed King
Paternal Care
The Girl and the Robot with Flowers
Intangibles Inc. and Other Stories
Neanderthal Planet
Randy's Syndrome
Send Her Victorious
Intangibles Inc.
Since the Assassination
The Moment of Eclipse
. . . And the Stagnation of the Heart
Confluence
Down the Up Escalation
Heresies of the Huge God
Orgy of the Living and the Dying
Poem at a Lunar Eclipse
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long
Swastika!
That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art . . .
The Circulation of the Blood . . .
The Day We Embarked for Cythera . . .
The Moment of Eclipse
The Village Swindler
The Worm That Flies
Working in the Spaceship Yards
Neanderthal Planet
Neanderthal Planet
Danger: Religion!
Intangibles Inc.
Since the Assassination
The Book of Brian Aldiss
Comic Inferno
The Underprivileged
Cardiac Arrest
In the Arena
All the World's Tears
Amen and Out
The Soft Predicament
As for Our Fatal Continuity . . .
Send Her Victorious
Last Orders and Other Stories
Last Orders
Creatures of Apogee
Within the Black Circle
Killing Off the Big Animals
What Are You Doing? Why Are You Doing It?
 Enigma 2: Diagrams For Three Stories
The Girl in the Tau-Dream
The Immobility Crew
A Cultural Side-Effect
Live? Our Computers Will Do That for Us
The Monsters of Ingratitude IV
Waiting for the Universe to Begin
But Without Orifices
Aimez-Vous Holman Hunt?
Backwater
The Eternal Theme of Exile
All Those Enduring Old Charms
Nobody Spoke Or Waved Goodbye
The Expensive Delicate Ship
Carefully Observed Women
The Daffodil Returns the Smile
The Year of the Quiet Computer
An Appearance of Life
 Wired for Sound
Journey to the Heartland
New Arrivals, Old Encounters
New Arrivals, Old Encounters
The Small Stones of Tu Fu
 Three Ways
Amen and Out
A Spot of Konfrontation
The Soft Predicament
Non-Isotropic
One Blink of the Moon
Space for Reflection
Song of the Silencer
Indifference
The Impossible Puppet Show
Brothers of the Head and Where the Lines Converge
Brothers of the Head
Big Lover
Love is a Fores
Bacterial Action
Just for a Moment
Star-Time
I Was Never Deaf or Blind to Her Music
Where the Lines Converge
Foreign Bodies
A Romance of the Equator
Boat Animals
Foreign Bodies
Frontiers
Just Back From Java
The Skeleton
Seasons in Flight
The Other Side of the Lake
The Gods in Flight
The Blue Background
Igur and the Mountain
Incident in a Far Country
The Girl Who Sang
The Plain, the Endless Plain
Consolations of Age
The O in José
A Romance of the Equator
The Magic of the Past
North Scarning
The Magic of the Past
A Tupolev Too Far
A Tupolev Too Far
Ratbird
FOAM
Summertime Was Nearly Over
Better Morphosis
Three Degrees Over
A Life of Matter and Death
A Day in the Life of a Galactic Empire
Confluence
Confluence Revisited
North of the Abyss
The Secret of This Book
Common Clay
How the Gates Opened and Closed
Headless
Travelling Towards Humbris
If Hamlet's Uncle Had Been a Nicer Guy
Else the Isle with Calibans
A Swedish Birthday Present
His Seventieth Heaven
Rose in the Evening
On the Inland Sea
A Dream of Antigone
The God Who Slept With Women
Evans in His Moment of Glory
Horse Meat
An Unwritten Love Note
Making My Father Read Revered Writings
Sitting With Sick Wasps
Becoming the Full Butterfly
Traveller, Traveller, Seek Your Wife in the Forests of This Life
Another Way Than Death
That Particular Green of Obsequies
The Ancestral Home of Thought
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long
Supertoys Last All Summer Long
Supertoys When Winter Comes
Supertoys in Other Seasons
Apogee Again
III
The Old Mythyology
Headless
Beef
 Nothing in Life is Ever Enough
A Matter of Mathematics
The Pause Button
Three Types of Solitude
Steppenpferd
Cognitive Ability and the Light Bulb
Dark Society
Galaxy Zee
Marvells of Utopia
Becoming the Full Butterfly
 A Whiter Mars: A Socratic Dialogue of Times to Come
Cultural Breaks
Tarzan of the Alps
Tralee of Man Young
The Eye Opener
Aboard the Beatitude
The Man and a Man with His Mule
Dusk Flight
Commander Calex Killed, Fire and Fury at the Edge of World, Scones Perfect
The Hibernators
The National Heritage
How the Gates Opened and Closed
Total Environment
A Chinese Perspective


Official Brian W. Aldiss Web Site



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