18 August 1925 - 19 August 2017
Aldiss in 2007
An obituary at the Guardian is available here.
Aldiss could be a hit-or-miss kind of author. His 1962 / 1976 novel Hothouse remains one of the best of his longer works, and one of his best shorter pieces was the 1964 proto-Steampunk novella The Saliva Tree.
On the other hand, his novel Helliconia Spring was so lumbering and badly composed that I didn't attempt to read the other two novels in the trilogy.
As with any author with so large an output, there was inevitably some lesser quality material being disbursed along with the better stuff. But Aldiss does stand as one of the more visible, and commercially successful, authors of the New Wave movement.
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