Brian Aldiss Quotes

74 Sourced 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.

Brian Aldiss
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

Brian Aldiss
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

Brian Aldiss
The bombs were only
In his head
On his memorial tree
A joker wrote
KEEP VIOLENCE IN THE MIND
WHERE IT BELONGS

Brian Aldiss
If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now.

Brian Aldiss
There have been mechanicals on the market with mini-computers for brains — plastic things without life, super-toys — but we have at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh.

Brian Aldiss
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.

Brian Aldiss
My wife Margaret and I sold our house to Sir Roger Penrose and his wife... Talking to Roger, I found we both agreed that AI, as they call it, is not going to be achieved by present-day machines."Artificial Intelligence" — that makes it sound simple, but what you're really talking about is artificial consciousness, AC. And I don't think there's any way we can achieve artificial consciousness, at least until we've understood the sources of our own consciousness. I believe consciousness is a mind/body creation, literally interwoven with the body and the body's support systems. Well, you don't get that sort of thing with a robot.

Brian Aldiss
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names for hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

Brian Aldiss
As long as the chromosome reproduced itself in sufficient dominance, he was immortal! To him, in an unscientific age, the problem did not present itself quite like that; but he realized that there was a trait to be kept in the family.

Brian Aldiss
When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations.

Brian Aldiss
Frank II had been back in the aptly named Mother Country for only a few months when a lady of his acquaintance presented him with Frank IV. Frank IV was a girl, christened Berenice. The state of coma which had ensnared Frank II for so long did not afflict Berenice, or any other of his descendants.
Another tremendous adjustment in the shared consciousness had to be made. That also had its compensations; Frank was the first man ever really to appreciate the woman's point of view.

Brian Aldiss
The midwife bustled out to the four in the antechamber and announced that the Almighty (who had recently become a Protestant) had seen fit to bless milady with a son.

Brian Aldiss
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.

Brian Aldiss
When knowledge becomes formulated into a science, then it does take on a life of it's own, often alien to the human spirit that conceived it.

Brian Aldiss
That's one thing about these religious boys—they reckon that if they are on God's side, then the enemy must be on the devil's, and so they have no qualms about giving it to 'em hot and strong.

Brian Aldiss
In Mrs. Swinton's garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David.

Brian Aldiss
I'm lucky that SFWA has such a short memory. I was always the Young Turk, the gadfly. Part of the New Wave, although I didn't fit in there either! I spent years, and two histories, putting the so-called Old Guard in their place, and now I'm one of them!

Brian Aldiss
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.

Brian Aldiss
To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important.

Brian Aldiss
Sounds to me as if you want journalists, Timberlane said.
No, sir, we require steady men with integrity. This is not a scoop, it's a way of life.

Brian Aldiss
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Brian Aldiss
Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It's patriotic to overconsume.

Brian Aldiss
Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question:
Where was "here"?
He shut that one down sharply.
Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorize your knowledge.

Brian Aldiss
"Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?"
The bear shuffled its alternatives. "Real things are good."
"I wonder if time is good. I don't think Mummy likes time very much. The other day, lots of days ago, she said that time went by her. Is time real, Teddy?"

Brian Aldiss
They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

Brian Aldiss
Monica Swinton, twenty-nine, of graceful shape and lambent eye, went and sat in her living room, arranging her limbs with taste. She began by sitting and thinking; soon she was just sitting. Time waited on her shoulder with the maniac slowth it reserves for children, the insane, and wives whose husbands are away improving the world.

Brian Aldiss
Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin — nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation.

Brian Aldiss
Here is what I wrote about SF. If it has a familiar ring, my publishers liked it well enough to make it into a postcard for publicity purposes. 'I love SF for its surrealist verve, its loony non-reality, its piercing truths, its wit, its masked melancholy, its nose for damnation, its bunkum, its contempt for home comforts, its slewed astronomy, its xenophilia, its hip, its classlessness, its mysterious machines, its gaudy backdrops, its tragic insecurity.'
Science fiction has always seemed to me such a polyglot, an exotic mistress, a parasite, a kind of new language coined for the purpose of giving tongue to the demented twentieth century.

Brian Aldiss
"I'm no good, Teddy. Let's run away!"
"You're a very good boy. Your Mummy loves you."
Slowly, he shook his head. "If she loved me, then why can't I talk to her?"
"You're being silly, David. Mummy's lonely. That's why she had you."
"She's got Daddy. I've got nobody 'cept you, and I'm lonely."

Brian Aldiss