He should be.

I hope this book reminds his admirers of why they love his work; but more than that, I trust it will find him new readers, and that the new readers will, in turn, find an author they can trust (as much as ever you can trust an author) and to love.

This was my Introduction to Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber, 2010.

Hothouse

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade

“The Garden,” Andrew Marvell

Brian Aldiss is now the preeminent English science fiction writer of his generation. He has now been writing for over fifty years with a restless energy and intellect that have taken him from the heart of genre science fiction to mainstream fiction and back again, with explorations of biography, fabulism, and absurdism on the way. As an editor and as an anthologist he has done much to influence the kind of science fiction that people were reading through the sixties and seventies, and was responsible for shaping tastes of readers of science fiction in the UK. He has been a critic, and his examinations of the SF field, Billion Year Spree and its reinvention, Trillion Year Spree, were remarkable descriptions of the genre that Aldiss argued began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and defined as “Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.” His career has been enormous: it has recapitulated British SF, always with a ferocious intelligence, always with poetry and oddness, always with passion; while his work outside the boundaries of science fiction, as a writer of mainstream fiction, gained respect and attention from the wider world.

Brian Aldiss is, as I write this, a living author, still working and still writing, and a living author who has restlessly crossed from genre to genre and broken genre lines whenever it suited him; as such he is difficult to put into context, problematic to pigeonhole.

As a young man in the army Brian Aldiss found himself serving in Burma and in Sumatra, encountering a jungle world unimaginable in gray England, and it is not too presumptuous to suggest that the inspiration for the world of Hothouse began with that exposure to the alien, in a novel that celebrates the joy of strange and savage vegetable growth.

He was demobbed in 1948, returned to England and worked in a bookshop while writing science fiction short stories. His first book was The Brightfount Diaries, a series of sketches about bookselling, and shortly thereafter he sold his first set of science fiction stories in book form—Space, Time and Nathaniel—began editing, became a critic and describer of SF as a medium.

Aldiss was part of the second generation of English science fiction writers; he had grown up reading American science fiction magazines, and he understood and spoke the language of “Golden Age” science fiction, combining it with a very English literary point of view. He owed as much to early Robert Heinlein as to H. G. Wells. Still, he was a writer, and not, say, an engineer. The story was always more important to Aldiss than the science. (American writer and critic James Blish famously criticized Hothouse for its scientific implausibility; but Hothouse delights in its implausibilities, and its impossibilities—the oneiric image of the web-connected moon is a prime example—are its strengths, not weaknesses.)