Meet the Author | Book Bites – Brian Aldiss: Greybeard. (Quicktime autoload)
I just started plowing through some early work by one of may favorite UK New Wave SF authors, Brian Aldiss. I have never really plumbed what attracts me to his work, but he shares a commoanlity of tone and certain interests with his peer J. G. Ballard.
I am just beginning his 1964 Greybeard, a book I have no idea how I missed as a kid. It’s got me hooked. For whatever reason, a trope of the British New Wave was the ‘disaster novel,’ in which some never-well-delineated catastrophe has upended human society. The hallmark of these books is the resolute focus on character development and interaction rather than the American Golden Age describe-and-prescribe modality.
This book comes quite early in the writer’s career, and so it came to me as a deep an pleasant surprise to come across the link up top, in which the author descibes a bit about how the work came to be.
I adore Aldiss’ material, and have stacks and stacks of his books; it truly mystifies me that I never came across this volume previously.
The same site offers clips of the author on essentially all of his best known work, but not, alas, my minor favorite, The Malacia Tapestry:
The Helliconia Trilogy: Aldiss’ masterwork, an encyclopedic history covering 5000 years of a world whose seasons change as slowly as ice ages.
Supertoys Last All Summer Long: The short story that inspired A. I.
The Twinkling of an Eye: A work I do not believe I have read.
Trillion Year Spree: Aldiss, who has worked as a critic for many years in the UK, looks at SF. This book helped inspire in me the idea that genre fiction is well worthy of serious critical investigation.
Super-state: A recent work that I am unfamiliar with.
Affairs at Hampden Ferrers: A non-SF novel. I haven’t read this but I have read much of his non-SF material and it is quite good.
Greybeard: The catastrophe novel I’m reading today.
Non-Stop: Another work that I’m unfamiliar with; however I suspect I have read it sometime in the deep past.