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Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE (; born 18 August 1925) is an English writer and anthologies editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society. He is also (with the late Harry Harrison) co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Aldiss was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000 and inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. He has received two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award.〔 His influential works include the short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long", the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg film ''A.I. Artificial Intelligence''. Aldiss was associated with the British New Wave of science fiction. == Life and career == Aldiss's father ran a department store that his grandfather had established, and the family lived above it. He started to write stories as a 3 year old which his mother would bind and put on a shelf. At the age of 6, Brian was sent to board at West Buckland School in Devon, and then on to Framlingham College.〔 During World War II in 1943, he joined the Royal Signals, and saw action in Burma; his Army experience inspired the Horatio Stubbs second and third books, ''A Soldier Erect'' and ''A Rude Awakening''. After the war, he worked as a bookseller in Oxford. He wrote a number of short pieces for a booksellers' trade journal about life in a fictitious bookshop, which attracted the attention of Charles Monteith, an editor at the British publisher Faber and Faber. As a result, Aldiss's first book was ''The Brightfount Diaries'' (Faber, 1955), a 200-page novel in diary form about the life of a sales assistant in a bookshop. About this time he also began to write science fiction for various magazines. According to ISFDB his first speculative fiction in print was the short story ''Criminal Record'', published by John Carnell in the July 1954 number of ''Science Fantasy''.〔 Several of his stories appeared in 1955 including three in monthly issues of ''New Worlds'',〔 a more important magazine also edited by Carnell. In 1954, ''The Observer'' newspaper ran a competition for a short story set in the year 2500, Aldiss's story ''Not For An Age'' was ranked third following a reader vote.〔'Short Story, Ballot' The Observer; Jan 16, 1955 page 9;〕 ''The Brightfount Diaries'' had been a minor success, and Faber asked Aldiss if he had any more writing that they could look at with a view to publishing. Aldiss confessed to being a science fiction author, to the delight of the publishers, who had a number of science fiction fans in high places, and so his first science fiction book was published, a collection of short stories entitled ''Space, Time and Nathaniel'' (Faber, 1957). By this time, his earnings from writing matched his wages in the bookshop, so he made the decision to become a full-time writer. Aldiss led the voting for Most Promising New Author of 1958 at the next year's World Science Fiction Convention, but finished behind "no award".〔 He was elected President of the British Science Fiction Association in 1960. He was the literary editor of the ''Oxford Mail'' newspaper during the 1960s. Around 1964 he and his long-time collaborator Harry Harrison started the first ever journal of science fiction criticism, ''Science Fiction Horizons'', which during its brief span of two issues published articles and reviews by such authors as James Blish, and featured a discussion among Aldiss, C. S. Lewis, and Kingsley Amis in the first issues, and an interview with William S. Burroughs in the second. Besides his own writings, he has had great success as an anthologist. For Faber he edited ''Introducing SF'', a collection of stories typifying various themes of science fiction, and ''Best Fantasy Stories''. In 1961 he edited an anthology of reprinted short science fiction for the British paperback publisher Penguin Books under the title ''Penguin Science Fiction''. This was remarkably successful, going into numerous reprints, and was followed up by two further anthologies, ''More Penguin Science Fiction'' (1963), and ''Yet More Penguin Science Fiction'' (1964). The later anthologies enjoyed the same success as the first, and all three were eventually published together as ''The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus'' (1973), which also went into a number of reprints. In the 1970s, he produced several large collections of classic grand-scale science fiction, under the titles ''Space Opera'' (1974), ''Space Odysseys'' (1975), ''Galactic Empires'' (1976), ''Evil Earths'' (1976), and ''Perilous Planets'' (1978) which were quite successful. Around this time, he edited a large-format volume ''Science Fiction Art'' (1975), with selections of artwork from the magazines and pulps. In response to the results from the planetary probes of the 1960s and 1970s, which showed that Venus was completely unlike the hot, tropical jungle usually depicted in science fiction, he and Harry Harrison edited an anthology ''Farewell, Fantastic Venus!'', reprinting stories based on the pre-probe ideas of Venus. He also edited, with Harrison, a series of anthologies ''The Year's Best Science Fiction'' (Nos. 1-9 1968-1976) Brian Aldiss also invented a form of extremely short story called the ''Minisaga''. The Daily Telegraph hosted a competition for the best Minisaga for several years and Aldiss was the judge. He has edited several anthologies of the best Minisagas. He traveled to Yugoslavia, where he met Yugoslav fans in Ljubljana, Slovenia; he published a travel book about Yugoslavia entitled Cities and Stones (1966), his only work in the genre;〔http://brianaldiss.co.uk/writing/non-fiction/non-fiction-a-p/cities-stones/〕 he published an alternative-history fantasy story, "The Day of the Doomed King" (1968), about Serbian kings in the Middle Ages; and he wrote a novel called ''The Malacia Tapestry'', about an alternative Dalmatia. In addition to a highly successful career as a writer, Aldiss is also an accomplished artist whose abstract compositions or 'isolées' are influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico and Wassily Kandinsky.〔email communication, 2011.〕 His first solo exhibition ''The Other Hemisphere'' was held in Oxford, August–September 2010, and the exhibition's centrepiece 'Metropolis' (see figure) has since been released as a limited edition fine art print.(The exhibition title denotes the writer/artist's notion, "words streaming from one side of his brain inspiring images in what he calls 'the other hemisphere'.")〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Brian Aldiss」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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