Brian Aldiss first encountered science fiction in 1938 in a branch of the newsagent chain Woolworths in Gorelston-On-Sea, Norfolk. Unsold pulp magazines from the United States of America were used as ballast for shipping for cargo moving between the US and the UK. The magazines would then appear in UK newsagents under the title of 'Yank-Mags'.
Aldiss would later say of his discovery of science fiction magazines in Gorelston-On-Sea that 'to a very large extent, my future was decided there and then.'
The November 1938 issue of the pulp Marvel Science Stories from Aldiss's personal library has a lurid cover by the pioneer of science fiction art, Frank R. Paul.
The Brian Aldiss Library, University of Liverpool SC&A, uncatalogued
Aldiss graduated from US pulps such as Marvel Science Stories to Astounding Science Fiction, the premiere science fiction magazine of its time. The magazine under the editor John W. Campbell ushered in what is known as the Golden Age of science fiction, publishing works by classic science fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and C. L. Moore.
The issue on display is the February 1944 British edition of Astounding from Aldiss’s personal collection. The edition is a partial reprint of the October 1943 American edition and is a hundred pages shorter than the American one due to paper rationing during the Second World War.
The Brian Aldiss Library, University of Liverpool SC&A, uncatalogued
Aldiss felt that he had found in Astounding a community that believed as he did that 'tomorrow was going to be different from today, who believed that space travel was a possibility, who believed mankind might become unrecognisable.'
However, his schoolteachers were not so sympathetic, confiscating or tearing up issues of science fiction magazines if he was caught reading them.
The shared belief in space travel inspired Aldiss to his own spaceship designs for the Denny-McFarlane Expeditionary Ether Ship. The booklet has pop up elements showing the interior of the spaceship.
Aldiss began composing fiction from as young as three. Later, at boarding school, he would write stories for his classmates in the style of pulp magazines and hire them out for a penny.
Here are two examples of early writings in the form of a fictional newspaper, Daily Oakham, covering local matters in the future year of 1964. The second issue is more openly surreal, reporting on the destruction of some houses by a giant. The issue satirises the panic over population growth that would be a staple of 1960s science fiction and environmentalism.
While reading and practicing science fiction, the young Aldiss was becoming aware of his natural environment.
Aldiss spent the first twelve years of his life in Norfolk where his grandfather ran a draper’s shop. Aldiss’s parents moved to Devon in 1939 but the family returned to Norfolk on holiday.
In a school essay Aldiss describes a fishing trip to the Norfolk Broads in the summer of 1942 with his father and uncle. The atmospheric landscape described would inspire him to write his award winning novella 'The Saliva Tree' (1965) set in the Norfolk Broads.
Aldiss's other passion was art. He drew and painted throughout his life.
An early sketch shows a village street in the aftermath of a storm. A tree or fence has fallen down and washing is missing from the line. Humans are absent but flowers and shrubs remain, as does a cat striding from a behind a building. Desolation and the endurance of the natural world would become hallmarks of his mature work.
Aldiss's awareness of nature came to colour his understanding of the science fiction that he was reading.
In a school essay on science fiction written when he was sixteen (1942) Aldiss first developed his thesis about the interaction between humans and nature that he would later describe in Billion Year Spree (1973). Inspired by the science fiction magazines and novels he had read he imagines humans and aliens on the planets in our solar system. He posits 'man [is] governed by his environs' and wonders how beings would adapt to the hostile climates of the outer planets.
The belief that the environment shapes humanity became the underlying principle of Aldiss's science fiction.
In 1943, at just seventeen years old, Aldiss was called up to serve during the Second World War. He fought with the fourteenth army in Myanmar as part of the Royal Corps of Signallers. The jungles of Myanmar would leave a deep impression on Aldiss becoming a recurring motif of his fiction.
The influence of a colonised landscape on Aldiss is one shared by science fiction as a genre. Developing out of colonial adventure fiction in the nineteenth century, science fiction commonly uses colonial territories as the inspiration for alien environments. This tendency is visible in more recent science fiction such as the film Avatar (2009).
The item on display is an unpublished poem by Aldiss titled ‘The Last War. 1939-1945’. Though the poem speaks with bitterness of the Second World War, Aldiss subsequently described enjoying his wartime experience which allowed him to escape the dull life of school.
It was during the campaign in Myanmar (1944-45) that Aldiss first encountered the chemical DDT, which was used to limit the spread of insect-borne diseases among the soldiers in the Second World War. After the war, the substance was promoted for public use as an industrial insecticide.
Insecticides caused widespread environmental pollution, as Rachel Carson uncovered in her landmark work Silent Spring (1962), which kickstarted the environmentalist movement. DDT became a symbol of this pollution.
In this unpublished draft (undated) Aldiss describes being issued with DDT to eliminate lice on his uniform.