Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction

by Brian W. Aldiss

Science Fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.... No true understanding of Science Fiction is possible until it's origin and development are understood.... (from the author's Introduction)

Genres: Science Fiction, Criticism, Reference, Fiction, Literary Criticism, Books About Books, British Literature

339 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Pseudonyms: Jael Cracken, Peter Pica, John Runciman, C.C. Shackleton, Arch Mendicant, & "Doc" Peristyle.

Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.

Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Note the subtitle. Aldiss really is that arrogant, throwing around references and allusions as if every reader is as familiar with every name, every story, every event in history, every nod to popular culture, as he is... and that we should be simultaneously so impressed that we believe his scholarship and insight and agree that this is indeed "true." The vocabulary is also overwhelming; I'm as fond as any nerd of fancy words, but Aldiss doesn't seem to know a whole lot of ordinary ones, going so far as to invent ones. This is not the first book that those interested in the topic should read. In fact, despite a few interesting nuggets of ideas or lines, it's probably the last that completists should read.

Not long or heavy, full of notes, footnotes, and even bibliography and (inadequate) index.
After typing so many notes below, I have realized that I'm giving you pretty much all the good stuff. Read this trailer, and skip the movie, as they say.

I am gratified that he doesn't like Starship Troopers and that he does like Robert Sheckley (why is he less known nowadays? if you haven't heard of him, you def. aren't ready for this book).

I am glad that he alerted me to H.G. Wells' autobiography and criticisms. Check out my first comment below.

I am also glad he alerted me to a 'science fictional poem' by Mary Shelley's friend:

Darkness
BY LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
[...etc....]

(Well worth reading in full. All that glorious apocalyptic imagery, and you'll recognize line and themes also seen in some of your favorite stories, I'm sure.)

I appreciate his suggestion that some tropes (he uses the word props) "adroitly used, acquire baraka by long association." Of course I'm not Muslim, so I had to look up that word, but I do like it, and agree. (Thank goodness, or we could never have another story about generation ships, or uplifted animals, or android caregivers, etc. etc.)

On his suggestion, I will look for Clifford Simak's "best book," Ring Around the Sun (though I'm a fan of Simak's and don't even recognize the title), and more by the Pohl & Kornbluth team. Also Asimov's The Martian Way because, according to Aldiss, it's "much more forward-looking" than much else published at the time.

More titles I want to investigate are listed in the comments, to save space here.

One kinda snarky comment works sans context: "Of course, only a moralist would be silly enough to imagine... that the Sharon Tate murders and all the rest of Manson's odious mumbo-jumbo might be any sort of logical end result of the well-established and respectable pulp tradition of the all-powerful male, so largely epitomized in Campbell's swaggering intergalactic heroes."

Btw, I would never have imagined spending this much time and energy on a two star book. What's up with that? Also, I am not moved by this to read Aldiss's fiction.

(note to self, something I realized while researching something from this book, I must remember to use the term 'weird fiction' where I've been using 'Lovecraftian' because it's slightly broader...)

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a book that was very highly regarded as an important history and critique of the field when it was published. I remember reading several very positive reviews and having it recommended to me highly before I finally got around to it, and then being vaguely disappointed. I thought it was somewhat confusingly arranged, I found Aldiss's tone arrogant, egotistical, and needlessly critical, and I didn't agree with the importance (or lack thereof) of some of the things he panned or praised. Now I realize that if I had agreed with him entirely reading the book would have been a waste of time, and that since so many credible and intelligent people thought it a worthwhile volume, I must have missed a point or two. Nonetheless, I've never been moved to revisit this one, or to seek out the revised version, Trillion Year Spree.

[Nathan Shumate · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know when you're reading a nonfiction book and absorbing all the information, and then you hit a subject that you know we'll and see that the author got it all wrong, and realize that everything else you read probably has just as many mistakes? I hit that when I Aldiss twice mentioned Lovecraft's "hatred of science."

[Xenomantid · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subtitle is fairly self-explanatory. Aldiss lays out the history of science fiction as a literary genre in a non-chronological format. For instance, the exploration of some ancient Roman fantasies often mistaken for science fiction occurs in chapter three, after Aldiss describes some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Aldiss's main contention is that science fiction started as a "lively sub-genre of the Gothic," beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Intriguingly, he added that Frankenstein shares narrative characteristics with the Marquis de Sade's Justine, since both novels are about an innocent person who wanders the world and is abused by virtually everyone he or she encounters. Bet you never linked the first work of science fiction to Napoleon-era pornography before!

Less amusingly, Aldiss separates authors into the "thinking pole" and the "dreaming pole" and claims that, while not every author at the thinking pole is a master at his craft, very few authors at the dreaming pole write well. Thus, he dismisses the work of H.P. Lovecraft and Abraham Merritt and even pronounces the works of Clark Ashton Smith "unreadable." C.A. Smith is now renowned as a venerable prose stylist, so my only conclusion was that Aldiss likes his SF and fantasy to be concise and unsentimental. Predictably, Aldiss is kinder to Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, though they also wrote for pulp magazines and suffered reputations as crankers-out of sub-literature until television became popular. (Merritt was a male chauvinist pig, though, so I took less offense to Aldiss's disparaging of his high-flung romances. Fie on thee, hero of The Ship of Ishtar. I'm glad the book ended the way it did.)

In the end, Aldiss touches on the contemporary SF of his day (a day in 1973, that is). He predicts the dawning of a bright new era of science fiction. Did it come to pass? How will we ever know?

If you're fond of literary criticism, science fiction, and primary sources, then you ought to give this book a read. Billion Year Spree is an excellent time capsule of that period between the "New Wave" of science fiction and the genre's mainstream acceptance with the advent of Star Wars. You may not share all of Aldiss's opinions, but you'll learn a different perspective.

[Timothy Dymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of man 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 mould.’

Brian Aldiss’s definition of SF in ‘Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction’ comes from the original 1973 edition. It was later updated and republished as ‘Trillion Year Spree’ using language of ‘humanity’ rather than ‘man’ - nevertheless its main thesis was unchanged: that the true origins of the SF genre (early editions called it the True History) come from the publication of Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’ (1818), whose themes continue to inform the genre: humanity being forced to confront itself in a society disintegrating because it has usurped the power of God through science.

Aldiss argues that:

‘Science fiction was born from the Gothic mode, is hardly free of it now. Nor is the distance between the two modes great. The Gothic emphasis was on the distant and the unearthly, while suspense entered literature for the first time …. Gothic's brooding landscapes, isolated castles, dismal old towns, and mysterious figures can still carry us into an entranced world from which horrid revelations may start.’

‘Science fiction writers have brought the principle of horrid revelation to a fine art, while the distant and unearthly are frequently part of the same package. Other planets make ideal settings for brooding landscapes, isolated castles, dismal towns, and mysterious alien figures’.

Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was well placed to write this history. He was a leading SF writer and editor from the late 1950s into the 2000s, and was heavily involved in the genre’s organisations such as the British Science Fiction Association and the international HG Wells Society. His short story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ (1969) was the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg 2001 film ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’. Writing often under pseudonyms, or as Brian W Aldiss - he was also associated with the British New Wave of SF, which brought literary and artistic experimentation into a genre whose writing style often involved prosaic ‘info dumps’ and wooden characterisation.

Aldiss was prompted to write ‘Billion Year Spree' out of frustration with what he felt were mistaken ideas about the origins of the SF itself, and his ambition to have it taken seriously as a genre in the UK. Of these two goals the latter has certainly been successful, as SF tropes and themes are widely recognised as permeating modern culture (though more often through TV and film than books). Aldiss would argue this is not new: for example Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel ‘The Coming Race’ - about a secret advanced civilisation living beneath the Earth’s crust and powered by a mysterious force called ‘Vril’ - was so popular that a popular beef based beverage ‘Bovril’ was named for it.

In arguing that ‘Frankenstein’ was the first true SF novel, Aldiss rebuts other origin theories. He concedes Edgar Allen Poe came tantalisingly close to being an early SF writer - he certainly pioneered the classic SF literary form: the short story - but Poe uses science to flavour his fiction rather than fully integrate scientific themes like Shelley does. Aldiss also refutes attempts to give SF origins in ancient Greece e.g. Plato’s utopian ‘Republic’, or Aristophane’s fantasy play ‘The Birds’. Even later fantasies such as Cyrano de Bergerac’s ‘Voyage dans la Lune’ (1657) or Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver's Travels’ (1726) don’t make the cut, as they are ‘tall stories mixed with utopian ideas’, or else political satires. They assume social orders are fixed, whereas Frankenstein depicts a society being revolutionised by internal forces of change both spurred by and spurring scientific discovery.

‘Billion Year Spree’ is a pioneering and ambitious work that concludes in a somewhat diffuse and shapeless way. However in the early 1970s the SF genre was already far too large for one history - demonstrated by Aldiss moving from ‘Billion’ to ‘Trillion’ in later volumes. Aldiss was also extremely Anglo-centric in his analysis, as locating the origins of SF in the Gothic requires British or at least northern European settings. Indeed it is in the Gothic novel’s descriptions of landscape that Aldiss sees the beginnings of the SF literary style of exposition. However even during Aldiss’s time of writing there was an acknowledged tradition of Russian and Eastern-European SF that rose to prominence especially during the Soviet era (e.g. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian ‘We’ (1924)). In the US there is considerable interest in ‘Afrofuturism’ - an SF that centres Black people - which can trace its origins to WEB Du Bois writing in the 1920s. Chinese SF also began after the fall of the Imperial system in the early 20th century, and now has an international prominence through novels such as Liu Cixin’s ‘The Three-Body Problem’ (2006).

Nevertheless, Aldiss provides a readable and interesting primer for a history of science fiction. He provides a basis for identifying its distinctive themes (e.g. merely ‘set on another planet’ does NOT equal SF if there is no drama of change), even if his actual history can only ever be partial.

[Martin Empson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent enough history, but so dated. I would have liked more on issues like class, race, gender and sexuality in SF and perhaps more historical context. The 1960s were more than Beatles, clockwork orange and Vietnam.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dated, yes; could be replaced by a later, revised book Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, maybe.
Nevertheless this book provides a valuable new perspective to me, who grew up reading translated science fictions hand-picked by Chinese editors mainly according to SF awards (especially the Hugo Awards), because Mr. Aldiss is not so keen on Gernsback, Amazing Stories, Heinlein, et al. On the other hand, his critics and recommendations on some less known (at least in China) SF authors and works are quite informative to me.
I ended up adding quite a few oldie-but-goodies into my TBR list.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science fiction is one of my passions and pastimes, and since I take my pleasure seriously, I'm interested in reading more nonfiction work about the history of science fiction. I've some more critique-oriented work in the last few months, but this is my first genuine history of the genre. Brian W. Aldiss is a literary voice I blow hot n cold about - I'm a fan of his Helliconia trilogy, but I wasn't too enamored with *The Island of Doctor Moreau* and *Cryptozoic!* over the last couple months - but everyone who I like to listen to says that reading this book helps gives a good foundation about the history of the field. So if they like it, I might as well try it right? So... did it end up rewriting my contextual foundation of my favorite art form?... no. Aldiss gets buried too deeply in the weeds no matter the intelligent ideas he's trying to push out, which ends up harming my enjoyment of this work. But I do agree that it's more or less an essential volume, and would like to give a heads up about what exactly it covers before getting too critical of someone else's critiques...

Chapter one is about the novel that, according to Aldiss, started the science fiction genre: *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelly. He holds this idea quite dear (he brought it up in other critical essays I read in random collections over the last year) even though I don't necessarily agree with it - his reasoning is that Dr. Frankenstein's revival of the monster through technological and not fantastical themes betrayed the increasing industrialization of the world and officially split SF off from its mother genre, "The Gothic". He waxes about *Frankenstein* for over thirty pages before turning his sights to Edgar Allen Poe and analyzing his contributions to science fiction. Then we go back to the "Pilgrim Father," Lucian, and others who wrote proto-science fiction that isn't science fiction because it's based in satire or some crap like that. I'm not saying that I know when the science fiction genre started, but if we count contemporary satire that throws some scientific principles out the window as part of its history, we should include some of these covered writers (Lucian, Voltaire, etc) as well - but he goes on different critical rants about this and that and highlights two specific works, *Robinson Crusoe* and *Gulliver's Travels*. These are works which signify much of what will be important to the "thinking" branch of science fiction, which is next explored in the second-to-next chapter about H. G. Wells which primarily digs into *The Time Machine*, *The War of the Worlds*, and some of the later nonfictional stuff that kept Wells published in the later thirties. The chapter before Wells' talks about the Victorian visions which predated the Father of Science Fiction. The chapter after is entitled "ERB and the Weirdies," a derogative phrase for the branch of science fiction which would take over American genre publishing in the 20s.

Aldiss takes us on journeys through all of Edgar Rice Burroughs' big series (Tarzan, Barsoom, etc) and then those of other "weirdies" like Lovecraft, who - according to Aldiss - had a dreadful aversion to science and an even bigger avoidance of writing high-quality prose. I don't agree with Mr. Aldiss here, but that's okay - we're not all supposed to agree. It is important to mention that this age brought forth the rise of "dreaming" science fiction, which looks at silly dreams of adventure more than true consideration of futures seen in thinking science fiction. Then we get to "Mainly the Thirties" where he discusses thinking writers like Huxley and C. S. Lewis and the dreaming editor Hugo Gernsback, "one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field." His formulaic and "scientifically accurate" stories rubbed poor old Aldiss the wrong way indeed - at least he liked John W. Campbell, the guy who propelled *Astounding* to right better written stories, a little more. We visit the Lensman and Jack Williamson (who stood firmly at the dreaming pole). His demand for logic propelled voices like Asimov and Heinlein to the top of the genre. But then in the fifties H. L. Gold opened *Galaxy* and started publishing more socially-aware fiction that also pushed envelopes. He'd publish forward-thinking Asimov fiction in the same month that Campbell would publish a backwards-thinking Asimov piece. Eventually we get into the world of the New Wave - the contemporary distinctions between the American and the British don't seem to exist, for better or worse - where Carnell and Moorcock are important editors in the movement of more literarily aware fiction in the then-present day with authors like Ballard proclaimed as stalwarts of the movement. He takes a chapter to ramble a little more and mention authors he thinks are nicely forward-thinking (I appreciate the reference to T. J. Bass, an unsung voice since he only wrote two novels, here) before predicting that the future of genre will involve including more elements of visual styles like comic books and film while have more grades between solely the "high brow" and the "low brow"...

This book was an interesting read, but not an engaging one. This, on the face of it, doesn't make sense because Aldiss, despite some faults, tends to write well. He can be smooth and engaging while also taking some time to be prickly, which is pretty cool. But he spends a lot of time kind of... navel-gazing in this book. Where I'd like him to shade in some connective tissue between the different stages of genre he usually just rambles on about the particular worth of this book or that book; he spends quite a few pages on the likes of *Gulliver's Travels*, and while that's fine, I don't enjoy reading critique of books that I haven't read - like *Gulliver's Travels.* I think that Aldiss is definitely informed enough (to side-quote Harlan Ellison) to have an informed opinion, but if you haven't read every famous or obscure work of literature that he has, it can feel like he's looking down on you for inexperience and incompetence. I don't think that was Aldiss' goal, but that's definitely how a lot of people took it - for my part, I was just a bit bored. I was here to read more about the flow of the genre, and one of the more unique and interesting claims he had - that the Gothic genre is the mother of the SF one - aren't really explained. What does "Gothic" mean? To some people it means simply thunderstorms and dark European castles, just as the science fiction genre means spaceships and boyish war stories to many of the uncultured. He never defines what exactly it is that makes it a subgenre, a child, and those kind of holes in his narrative irked and disengaged me.

He does have a couple big ideas; the simplest and furthest encompassing is probably his view that there's a difference between "dreaming" and "thinking" science fiction. The latter came first (believe it or not) and is more important than the the "dreaming" and its boyish, sometimes right-wing side of things. I liked his realization that the "future war" subgenre of SF (as seen in novels like *The World Set Free*, which is arguably more of a utopian tale than a future war story) came to a death after World War II and the nuclear explosions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; I also liked his classification of authors such as Bester and Barrington J. Bayley into the genre of the "widescreen baroque," which is kind of a counterpart of space opera for the works I don't like to call space opera - it's about zany adventures and larger-than-life characters and I quite liked that small addition to my critical toolbox.

At the end of the day, though, this stands out more as a grumpy work of critique than it does an engaging history of the field. I'm hoping that Adam Roberts' history of the genre does a better job of dissecting the evolution of the genre than this. I mean, it's nice that Aldiss isn't playing the "game" of objectivity here - he's perfectly upfront about the fact that he has plenty of opinions with other may or may not be in agreeance with - and that's one of the good things I can say about his form here. But I came here more for knowledge than Aldiss' opinions, which I disagree with often enough to not get too much out of. At the end of the day, I recommend it if you're looking to get into reading about the past of SF because it is objectively a landmark work, although you might be better eased-in by something a bit more colorful and narrative-driven like *Astounding* by Alec Nevala Lee, one of the best books in this little genre that I've read. Hopefully more come my way very soon...

And hopefully they rate higher than a 7/10, which is what *Billion Year Spree* is getting. I mean, that's not a bad rating, but that's taking into account all of the objective upsides of the book, not my raw feeling about it. After three Aldiss books in about as many months I think I'm reading to take a bit of a break, but I hope that when I return it's alongside one of major works like *Hothouse* or *Greybeard*, or at least a re-read of the Helliconia trilogy. Thanks for reading this review, and here's wishing you better luck than I the next time you go spelunking into the annals of science fiction history...

[Terence Park · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hugely important work. Brian began the process of pulling together the history of SF which, required a level of analysis and categorisation that we take for granted today. He defines the early literary strands that grow, thicken and mutate into the genre, going up to 1973 in my edition. His reasoning behind his narrative is clear and his coverage of inputs to the genre is fairly comprehensive. I might weight some of those early inputs differently but this is only a matter of degree.
In the intervening years, SF has added a couple of 90° mutations (social sub-genres and the e-pulp explosion) which may well leave the casual reader delving back into Billion Year Spree, gasping for air. Go back in time and what you know isn't yet built or written.
Analysis and categorisation still goes on in other places (e.g. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). For those of us who take the genre seriously, the work has its own reward.

[Chris Duval · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an easy read; it's pleasing to have an author as literary critic. It's also informative (up to the time it was written), though sometimes Mr. Aldiss's opinions--particularly his condemnations--differ considerably from my more accepting tastes.

The book picks an Anglo-centric definition of SF, moderated when applied to more recent years(relative to the time of writing). When applied to earlier eras it excludes books that, for example, a French speaker would include. I didn't find this a severe defect, taking it for just the limitation of scope needed to keep the book's length acceptable.

My edition is the Schoken paperback, whose glue had dried long ago as it sat on my shelves--perhaps even earlier. As I read the first half, the groups of pages fell out.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though it's dated and needs a thorough revision to cover the field from the 70s where the book left off, Aldiss' true history of science fiction makes some amazing claims and arguments regarding the field's beginnings, big names, historical books, and the context. At times, I find him on the elitist end of the spectrum, especially the way he dismisses the early Gernsbeckian gadget fiction as juvenile and ghetto, his analyses are very important.

This book was very instrumental in its advocacy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being the start of the science fiction field as we know it. His arduous defense and compelling analysis of the book definitely made an impact on the history of science fiction and changed the perception of Shelley's novel.

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

What can I say? This book is a history, so it is as it must be: droll and full of long lists that are only informative to those who have a full knowledge of the books and authors listed already. Of course, it illuminates several interesting trends, occurrences, and definitions that I was not familiar with. That's a given. It is just not really the sort of light reading that most science fiction fans are looking for, ironically. I think the author was a bit bombastic, but overall, it was interesting. You just have to take it with a grain of salt because there's bound to be tons of information that means nothing to you because you haven't read the books referred to.

[Giovanni Giusti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un viaggio sorprendente e meraviglioso, anche se un po' meno lungo di un miliardo di anni, che ci porta da Mary Shelley ed Edgar Allan Poe ai miei amatissimi Phil Dick, Ballard, Brunner, Walter Miller e Ursula Le Guin, passando da Swift, HG Wells, Kafka, Huxley, Orwell, CS Lewis e compagnia bella. Una visione acuta ed originale del lungo cammino della science fiction, vista nella sua costante oscillazione (ambivalenza?) tra le radici gotiche/romantiche e quelle utopiche/scientifiche, tra letteratura "alta" e produzione di consumo, tra riflessione sull'uomo ed evasione pura. Il viaggio si ferma agli inizi degli anni settanta, ma vale veramente la lettura per la vastità e l'accuratezza del quadro di insieme qui tratteggiato, i cui riferimenti consentono di comprendere meglio anche l'evoluzione della sf dei decenni successivi, e della letteratura fantastica/distopica tout court.

[Stoffia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billion Year Spree est, en quelque sorte, le premier livre d'histoire de la science-fiction. C'est lui qui a établi les canons du genre, les catégories et écoles de pensée que l'on utilise encore aujourd'hui pour en parler.

C'est donc une œuvre importante avec un travail de recherche et de débroussaillage incroyable.

L'histoire qu'elle écrit est aussi celle contre laquelle la plupart des livres d'histoire de la science-fiction contemporains sont écrit aujourd'hui. Elle raconte une histoire d'hommes blancs cishets, etc. Qui, eux mêmes, racontent des futurs qui leur ressemblent, à eux et uniquement eux.

Bref, le livre d'Aldiss est un livre important, mais daté, et carrément insuffisant pour comprendre le visage de la SF contemporaine.

[André · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anno 2020 is dit een gedateerd boek. De geschiedenis van de sf gaat tot begin jaren 70 vorige eeuw. Er mist dus bijna 50 jaar! Maar als introductie is het nog wel te doen, hoewel het niet altijd even makkelijk leest. Soms wat taai. Met veel uitstapjes net buiten het genre, dat geeft toch het gevoel dat veel onbesproken is gebleven...

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

surprisingly erudite and literate, just a shame it was published before the children of the New Wave started writing.

[David Critchfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

interesting, enlightening, and wonderful

[Sugar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Opted to reshelve this one. Too academic for the energy level I can summon at bedtime.

[Tristan]

The Internet Archive carries a digitised copy of the 1973 Doubleday first edition.

[Iwan Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great whistle-stop through SF, by one of the giants of the genre.

[Steve LaForest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science Fiction - a review. NOTE - MUCH high brow incomprehensible crap, rated anywhere from A - to D -.

I'm afraid that I have not enjoyed any of the short fiction that I have read by Aldiss - which makes me hesitant to try any of his novels. I am tempted by Helliconia Spring, Summer, Winter, though - they do sound very interesting.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

After putting this down, I wanted to find much of what Aldiss mentioned. Many of the titles are no longer in print.
With our portable digital guides, I can run a search and find electronic versions, irony-of-ironies.
Inevitably, I must wipe the tears and stutter past sputtering lips: "It's not the same..."

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

the text book for a college SF class. i was reading the night Lenon was killed

[Anthony Faber · Rating 5 out of 5]

His "Trillion Year Spree" is an updated version of this. I just skimmed to make sure it was pretty much the same and read the last chapter, because that was somewhat different.