Science Fiction Author Brian Aldiss Dies Aged 92

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed writes: Acclaimed Science Fiction author Brian Aldiss, first published in the 1950s, has died at the age of 92. Aldiss wrote such science fiction classics as Non-Stop, Hothouse and Greybeard, as well as the Helliconia trilogy, winning the Hugo and Nebula prizes for science fiction and fantasy, an honorary doctorate from the University of Reading, the title of grand master from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and an OBE for services to literature. Tributes from contemporaries and younger authors have been plentiful.
In 1969 Aldiss published the short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (1969), which after decades of work became the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg movie A.I. in 2001.

Re:

[sheramil]

Didn't do Spielberg much good.

Anyway Aldiss' fiction didn't include gays, women, transsexuals, so he would't win a Hugo today.

You, evidently, have not read any of Aldiss' fiction.

"Let those who will, object to vivisection -"

Vivisection

has no objection

to them."

- "The Eighty Minute Hour"

Re:

[nospam007]

"A.I. was so bad it killed Kubrick, and it was his story."

I remember.

'He wants our love, we want our money back.'

Re:

[Z00L00K]

Time to get a book or two by him then. "non-stop" is probably the easiest, Helliconia most epic - on the same level as the lord of the rings trilogy.

Re:

[Crashmarik]

I would have gone with Hothouse. Probably his best science fiction

Re:

[hughbar]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (aka Cryptozoic also very good). Yes, it took slashdot a week to discover this. Still, he's not a fashionable author now.

Cause of death:

[Gravis Zero]

Hang gliding accident. (He was 92, you boob!)

You only noticed now?

[Chris Mattern]

He died a week ago!

A.I. super-toys vs. pulp fiction supertoys

[epine]

Wikipedia can't make up its mind.

The A.I. Artificial Intelligence page consistently uses "Super-Toys", while the main article, Supertoys Last All Summer Long [wikipedia.org] consistently goes the other direction.

Google: "Super-Toys" Last All Summer Long -"supertoys" = 66,800 results

Google: "SuperToys" Last All Summer Long -"super-toys" = 70,300 results

Squeaker. By the Law of Electoral College, I think the first item wins.

But no, let's aim higher.

Writing Talk: Conversations with top writers of the last fifty years [google.ca] — 2014

As this book goes to print in 2012, author Brian Aldiss tells me that his entire production of fiction is to be republished.

And this:

How many times can films destroy books? ...

"The risk was patent," he allowed, "because Stanley gave me a beautiful illustrated copy of Pinocchio, and he always wanted Pinocchio to be the Blue Fairy. When I heard those dreadful words, the Blue Fairy, I really started throwing up. I couldn't take this.

"But all right, I went to work with him. At ten o'clock they'd come and collect me, we'd find a pub, we'd go over this with lots of coffee, lots of Marlboros, and sometimes we seemed to be getting somewhere. But always he was determined that David the super toy should cease to be a fairy and become a real boy, while I hoped that between us we could have created a modern myth. That this robot child could exist in modern society and it would be of enormous interest.

"But this didn't interest Kubrick one bit. Do you know, he spent two years thinking about my short story? Perhaps he'd lost some of his earlier genius."

When Kubrick died it was taken over by Spielberg, and was out of reach of its originator, who now said to me wistfully, "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long is a nice title. It's poetic, it sounds nice. And what will the audience thing when winter comes?"

My bold & paragraph breaks.

I think Aldiss would have wanted his views known, so I quoted a bit more than normal given the occasion.

As copyright now works—de facto—everyone who reads the above quotation is now obligated to buy Alex Hamilton's fine book—that's how it now works, right?

Re:

[epine]

s/thing/think

Re:

[epine]

Well, who is this Alex Hamilton, anyway, with most of a famous name?

Alex Hamilton obituary [theguardian.com] — November 2016

Above all, Alex conducted scores of interviews with important literary figures. In fact, he probably met more famous authors than anyone else on earth. Among them were Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Gunter Grass, Chinua Achebe and Jorge Luis Borges, who delighted Alex by saying that when he himself wrote horror stories, he shed tears, "tears of laughter". A selection of these conversations was issue