New from Bodleian Library Publishing - Brian Aldiss: An Exile on Planet Earth

Published to celebrate the deposit of the Brian Aldiss archive in the Bodleian Library, An Exile on Planet Earth brings together twelve personal and revealing essays by the master of science fiction, offering real insight into his life and work. This collection of essays, most of which are revised for this volume, is a testimony to the influences behind Brian Aldiss' writing, showing how the circumstances and events of his childhood are translated into strange metaphors in his novels and stories (the lonely boy playing on the beach in Walcot), how his identification with the 'exile' is a recurring theme throughout his work (it is surely no accident that he was asked to write an introduction to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago), and how a world without children (Greybeard) expressed his grief at the temporary loss of his own children after his first marriage broke up