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Brian Aldiss - InterviewBy Nicholas Newman 1 July 2007
It’s not only his fans who have come to his door but in the past Hollywood film producers including Corman, Kubrick and Spielberg, asking for permission to adapt both his general fiction and science fiction stories. Even Britain’s Queen has awarded him with an OBE in 2002 for his services to literature. Before we started the interview, Brian showed me to his jungle like back garden at his Oxfordshire village home. Brian Aldiss calls it his ‘mystery garden’, where in the bright sunshine, with the bubbling waterfall in the background, we discussed his frog problem. Brain commented that ‘it had been a bad year for frogs.’ I told him I had plenty to spare and would bring some round for him to replenish his pond. Working with Spielberg, Kubrick etc.It’s amazing how many people have seen, or read, Brian’s work. Hollywood directors Simon Channing-Williams, Roger Corman, Stanley Kubrick and Spielberg have all adapted his tales into films. Three notable adaptions have been Brothers of the Head, Frankenstein Unbound and A.I. However working with such famous film directors has certainly been a remunerative, exciting, but not necessarily a satisfactory experience. Take his experience working with Roger Corman, a prolific movie maker who directed the 1990 horror film Frankenstein Unbound, set in 19th century Switzerland, which starred John Hurt and Bridget Fonda. ‘Working with Roger was an extremely good experience for me. Corman invited me and my whole family to the set, a palazzo owned by the local Mayor of Bellagio on the shores of Lake Como. ‘The Mayor allowed free use of the palazzo for the film; on the condition he was given a role as an extra on the set. Brian had only one artistic difference with Roger Corman, over the inclusion of an extra scene when Frankenstein goes mad and destroys a laboratory. In A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), a modern retelling of the Pinocchio story, his experiences working in Hollywood brought home to him the old adage, ‘When one sells something to the movies the motto is take the money and run.’ Through working with Spielberg and Kubrick he learnt to appreciate the difficult task such producers have in adapting prose to the movies. Brian continued, ‘As Stanley Kubrick observed, you can have thousands of scenes in a book, but in a film you can’t afford the time or the money to reproduce every scene.’ In AI, Brian worked with two of Hollywood’s great directors, Stanley Kubrick and Spielberg. ‘It was interesting working with Stanley, Stanley Kubrick who wanted the android boy to meet the Blue Fairy and become a real boy. Brian Aldiss obstinately resisted this notion.’ Brian was astounded by this suggestion. When Brian was asked by his wife Margaret why he worked with Kubrick, Brian replied, ’I had always wanted to work with the genius that was Kubrick, though after a year’s work Stanley chucked me out.’ On leaving Brian said to Stanley ‘It’s impossible for you to make a film of my story and Stanley replied ‘Yes he could.’ Unfortunately fate proved Aldiss right, Stanley Kubrick died soon afterwards just before shooting was due to start and Kubrick’s friend Spielberg completed the film A.I in 2002. Brian Aldiss? That’s me!Brian Aldiss was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, England, son of a department store manager. Before he became a full time professional writer, he served in Burma and Indonesia during World War Two. After the War, he always wanted to be a writer. He said, ‘"I had the option as a writer of starving in a garret or starving in a bookshop in Oxford.’ He took the bookseller option. Brian started telling tales at an early age at a private boarding school. There he served his apprenticeship of how to spin a good yarn, how to get his fellow pupils always begging for more by creating a cliff-hanger at the end of each episode of his serial ghost stories, so they had to wait till the next day to find out what happened next. It is not surprising that Brian got punished for talking after ‘lights out’ in the pupils’ school dormitory by his teachers for talking when he should be asleep. He regularly got six with the cane on his pyjama bottom. He said,’ Nothing that any literary critics have done since has been more vicious than these punishments.’ His first bookBrian started his professional writing career, whilst working as a bookseller in Oxford; he was invited to write a humorous column about life in a factious bookshop for the Bookseller, a prestigious book trade weekly magazine. His column attracted the attention of Charles Monteith, editor at the British publishers Faber and Faber. As a consequence of this, Aldiss's first book was The Brightfount Diaries (1955), based on pieces from his Bookseller column. What has influenced his writing?‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ influenced Brian. He read omnivorously everything from Homer’s Odyssey to the works of Thomas Hardy, Patrick Hamilton, Sartre and Stendhal. Brian says, ‘I am often asked what has inspired me, in fact, it is life that has inspired me.’ When I asked Brian if he was carrying on the tradition of ancient Rome and Greece, in the telling of tales of beings with superior powers, strange monsters or gods doing dastardly deeds, he replied, ’I think I did – together with reflecting the chaos of the time in which we live!’ In my view I think even Shakespeare would be impressed with how Brian develops the their basic plot lines into often very sophisticated stories, where often several story lines are interwoven, in order to keep the active interest of the reader/viewer or listener Science FictionHe has enjoyed a life-long affection for science fiction, believing in the power of the imagination to transform our fallible world into metaphor. But the world visualised in the forties and fifties, with human exploration of the planets of the solar system, has not materialised. That exploration would have been a corporate endeavour. Nowadays, corporate adventure has given place to the worship of celebrities, often rather undistinguished persons prepared to pay one million pounds for a show-off marriage ceremony. Much of SF now reflects this state of affairs, and has become more domestic. The author stated, ‘For myself, I have grown interested in the vagaries and mysteries of the human mind. My new 'HARM' is an instance of this. Is Paul, the anglicised Muslim, a victim of the state - or of his own fevered imaginings? It is not SF as we used to know it; nor is the world as we used to know it,’ Brian observes. Thoughts on EuropeIn 2002 Brian published Super-state, a novel of a future Europe some forty years into the future. It was a comic novel packed full of contemporary recognisable characters. But when asked what he really thinks of the European Union, he replied, ‘it is the great social experiment of our time – a wonderful idea. Europe had, for centuries been plagued by religious obsessions, dynastic and territorial ambitions, which have stained the Continent with blood from one end to another, and now instead of war, we sit round a table in Brussels and argue it out. It’s fantastic; I don’t understand why more people don’t marvel about it.’ Should Turkey Join?His views on Turkey joining the EU were firm. ‘Yes, undoubtedly Turkey should join, because it is a secular state and it would be an advantage for Europe and it would help the secular forces in their struggle against extremism. ‘He knows the country well, with his son having business interests there. Brian’s father fought in WW1 at Gallipoli, where on a memorial set up by the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk had inscribed ‘Yes once we fought and died on this ground, and now your sons are as my sons, and all are equally regretted.’ Brian comments, ‘This is such a grand and generous gesture.’ Latest BooksThis summer two new books by Brian W. Aldiss will be published HARM and the latter, Walcott a story about a fictional family set in Britain during the 20th century, some of it based on his own experiences, both worth a read. At the end of the interview the artist had finally finished her sketch. It depicted Brian as a casually dressed, irascible 82-year-old man, still a youthful glint in his eye, with no doubt many more years of writing left.
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Meeting Brian W.
Aldiss is always a pleasure. I caught him in the midst of his portrait being
painted and getting ready to go off to yet another of those science fiction
conventions, where he will be adored by his fans. Life’s not bad for a man of
82, when admiring fans demand Brian to sign his name on their tee shirts (Photo:
Brian Aldiss in his garden of mystery).