Brian (Wilson) Aldiss Biography

(1991) With Somewhere East of Life, I have completed the Squire Quartet, which opened with Life in the West. These novels cover a great extent of territory, from the United States to Singapore and Turkmenistan, from Stockholm to Sicily. Always my native county of Norfolk, East Anglia, serves as a sort of fulcrum. Family affairs are set against the slow decline of the West and the abrupt demise of the Soviet Union.

An idea of how much I might encompass was brought home to me while writing the three Helliconia novels in the early to mid-1980s: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, and Helliconia Winter. I have never experienced that great divide some people detect between science fiction and the ordinary contemporary novel; this probably reflects my reading and the company I keep.

I write every day and always have done—not invariably for publication. My SF presents a spectrum moving from extreme surreal situations in the early novels to events merely colored by an incipient future. By the time I wrote Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head, I had already moved away from the confines of genre fiction.

Happily, my contemporary novels have been about as successful as the more imaginative ones. Recent pleasures include having a volume of critical essays and a selection of my poems published. I'm now working on a large-scale autobiographical "thing"—an unlicked cub as yet—which will contain my experience of and meditations on war.

To be able to write is a slice of great golden fortune.

* * *