Brian Aldiss Quotes

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.

What we see today is the too-easy acceptance of sf. The sharp idiom we created has blurred to become one of the bland flavourings of mass media; the unembarrassed muse we espoused is one of the jades of television. And the younger writers now writing have an entirely different approach to their art. They have found how easy it is to rely on formula, or how simply success can come through self-advertisement.

He let out a yell of joy. They danced round the room. Pressure of population was such that reproduction had to be strict, controlled. Childbirth required government permission. For this moment, they had waited four years. Incoherently they cried their delight.

Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.

That first novel of mine, Non-Stop, is directly attributable to Heinlein. His "Common Sense" seemed to me such a good story, but bereft of any human feelings. I thought long about that story, and then I thought how wonderful it would be to write about a spaceship in which people have been imprisoned for generations and to put in something of the human feeling. So that novel is directly attributable to Heinlein. I thought, in my youthful arrogance, that I could do it better — I didn't! I thought I could do it differently, and I think I did do it differently. And I suppose that on the whole, I've concentrated on doing things differently ever since.

Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.

The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

It’s the duty of men in office not to be misled.

The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone.

"You and I are real, Teddy, aren't we?" The bear's eyes regarded the boy unflinchingly. "You and I are real, David." It specialized in comfort.

Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again.

Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed — now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down...

There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when it looked as if the intellect might win over the body, and our species become something worthwhile. But too much procreation killed that illusion.

The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones.

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction — it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.