BrIan aldIss
Have you recycled your own life experiences in other stories? One of the next books was GREYBEARD. I was married – we were so poor we lived in Kidlington! We began to be more successful and moved to a lovely house in Oxford. My wife didn’t like living in Oxford and moved to the Isle of Wight. I was broken hearted. I missed the children hugely and expressed myself in a story where there was a time in the future when there were no children. I thought it was unlikely to be popular but now it’s a Penguin Classic. Tell me about the films you have been involved with. One of my books, Frankenstein Unbound, was made into a film by Roger Corman. It was marketed as a horror movie and starred John Hurt and Bridget Fonda. Corman was such a nice guy. He invited all my family to join the cast in Italy for the filming. It was great fun.
“MY FIRST STORIES WERE WRITTEN WHEN I WAS 14 AND WERE ‘THE ‘ADVENTURES OF WHIP DONOVAN’. WHIP TRAVELS ROUND THE SOLAR SYSTEM – I WROTE THEM AND ILLUSTRATED THEM WITH MY PAINTBOX.” Now let’s talk about A. I Artificial Intelligence… This started as a short story in a magazine. It was called Super-Toys Last All Summer Long. It’s about a robot boy who wants to be a real boy. Stanley Kubrick read it, liked it and got in touch. Then we started working on the film. It was great – every morning a limo would pick me up and it was fine. Stanley however was coming to the end of his life and it was rather challenging.
Now we live in one of the high tech futures you imagined. Are you comfortable in this world? Well quite honestly I don’t have much to do with it. My life is very much how it has always been in the past 60-odd years. I find myself impelled to write, which I do every day.* * And at that point Brian strode into his study to write another page - and I got into my car feeling that maybe I should just try harder. David
When he died Steven Spielberg took over the film and he was a delight to work with. It took a while: the production had its first meetings in the early 1970s and the film was finally released in 2001. Now we are 14 years into the new millennium. You wrote a history of Science Fiction called The Billion Year Spree. In that you argue that Science Fiction was a 20th century phenomenon… I think that’s true. Science Fiction is now concerned with a very restricted worldview. Gravity is a great movie but its vision is limited.
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