Brian Aldiss

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2007

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Brian Aldiss. He is best known for pioneering, alongside JG Ballard, a new wave of British science fiction writing in the 1960s. He says science fiction is not so much a prediction of the future as a metaphor for the human condition; and for him, at least, writing it offered an escape route and a filter through which to view his own extraordinary upbringing. He grew up in a small Norfolk village in a very devout and austere home. While his father was distant, his mother was still suffering from the grief after her first child, a daughter, was still-born. He was the second child and even when he was very small, remembers feeling a strong sense of his mother's disappointment in him.

The army finally offered a way out for him and it was on his return to England that he started writing seriously while also working in a bookshop. One of his early works was a short story describing the sadness felt by a boy who was never able to please his parents, which was turned into a film by Stanley Kubrick. While he remains best known for his science fiction writing - and has won every major award in the field - he has also written novels, poetry and biographies and short stories. Now, he says, he aims not for high sales but to become a better and better writer.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Old Rivers (with the Johnny Mann Singers) by Walter Brennan Book: Biography of John Osborne by John Halpern Luxury: A banjo

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week is the prolific author Brian Aldis, best known as a master of the science fiction genre, he's won virtually every major
0:35.6	award in the field and along with J.G. Ballard was one of the founders of a new wave of
0:40.2	British science fiction in the 60s. He says it suits him that science fiction
0:45.1	remains a kind of outcast literature regarded with suspicion in the holy places of
0:50.0	academe. Having said that he seems more than comfortable traveling well beyond the genre,
0:55.0	writing autobiography, poetry and straight fiction too.
0:59.0	His description of being brought up in the dull heart of Norfolk is a small clue to the significant misery of his early
1:05.4	childhood. Indeed, during the Second World War he felt it was a relief to escape into the Army,
1:11.1	and when his war ended, he didn't want to come home. For many of course
1:15.2	science fiction is a form of escape but for my castaway writing allows him to study
1:20.6	the human condition and understand his own childhood. He says novels are
1:25.6	messages not only to the reader but to the self. Well let's leave the self to a little
1:31.9	later on. Right now let's concentrate on the reader what is the
1:34.0	message Brian that you want to get over to your reader when you're writing well I don't
1:40.0	agree with those people who think that science friction is some kind of
1:42.6	prediction of the future. It may or it may not be. I think it's a metaphor and it's a
1:48.1	metaphor for the human condition. There's certainly something in me that urgently needs expression and it doesn't quite tell me what it is.
1:59.0	You can understand this in the works of many writers.
2:03.0	Thomas Hardy, for instance, writes about one thing,
2:06.5	but thinks about another.
	...

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