Brian Aldiss

You were fool enough to think that one hundred and fifty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man’s cerebral vortex.

— Brian Aldiss

If adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it!

— Brian Aldiss

You know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it in.

— Brian Aldiss

Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contra-terrene caverns of your fee-fi-fo-fumblingly fearful id!

— Brian Aldiss

“The intelligent have been overwhelmed by the dull. Is that not an invasion?”“More, I would say, of a self-betrayal.”

— Brian Aldiss

You know why I am a prisoner—because the laws are so stupid that we prefer to break them than to live by them, although it means life-long imprisonment.

— Brian Aldiss

He gets bored with the effort of trying to think, and is unhappy because he knows thinking, or at least “thinking-to-a-purpose” is on the black list of party activities.

— Brian Aldiss

“You see life as a contrast between misery and pleasure, Jon; that is not a correct interpretation.”“Exactly.”

— Brian Aldiss

“They enjoy their show of might,” Adam said. “These people have to express their unhappiness by using ugly things like guns and ill-fitting uniforms, and the whole conception of the camp.”

— Brian Aldiss

He had the settled expression of a certain kind of peasant—the kind that accepts, with protest but without malice, the vagaries of life. It is the gift life sends to compensate for the lack of a high I.Q.

— Brian Aldiss

There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when it looked as if the intellect might win over the body, and our species become something worthwhile. But too much procreation killed that illusion.

— Brian Aldiss

Never, never let action become a substitute for thought.

— Brian Aldiss

Why don’t you go somewhere quietly and consult your history books if you have no consciences to consult?

— Brian Aldiss

If you think with your emotions, slight glandular changes are sufficient to revise your entire outlook.

— Brian Aldiss

The ability to change should not be despised.

— Brian Aldiss

It’s the duty of men in office not to be misled.

— Brian Aldiss

I kill from conviction, not to pass a personality quiz.

— Brian Aldiss

Carnage added to carnage does not equal peace.

— Brian Aldiss

At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.

— Brian Aldiss

The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones.

— Brian Aldiss

All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness—or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know.Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share.

— Brian Aldiss

Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane.

— Brian Aldiss

What would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?

— Brian Aldiss

The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable and admitted no light. Darkness lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one's entry into a room — the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for purposeless beings have that air about them.

— Brian Aldiss

The thing was not discussable, even with a near acquaintance like Calvin because … because of the nature of the thing … because one had to behave like a normal, unworried human being. That at least was sound and clear and gave him comfort: behave like a normal human being.

— Brian Aldiss

Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question:Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorize your knowledge.

— Brian Aldiss

They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

— Brian Aldiss

Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should — not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that "here" and "not here" seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.

— Brian Aldiss

Jagger had gone through there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed.… Somewhere that wasn't the house.…

— Brian Aldiss

There's a way outside. We're — we've got to find out what we are." His voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He was shaking Calvin again. "We must find out what's wrong here. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment — or we're all monsters!

— Brian Aldiss

That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: "Whatever has been done to me, I've been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don't even know what it is. It's been a cheat, a cheat.…"

— Brian Aldiss

The midwife bustled out to the four in the antechamber and announced that the Almighty (who had recently become a Protestant) had seen fit to bless milady with a son.

— Brian Aldiss

It was extraordinary to be in two places at once, doing two different things — extraordinary, but not confusing. He merely had two bodies which were as integrated as his two hands had been.

— Brian Aldiss

As long as the chromosome reproduced itself in sufficient dominance, he was immortal! To him, in an unscientific age, the problem did not present itself quite like that; but he realized that there was a trait to be kept in the family.

— Brian Aldiss

Frank II had been back in the aptly named Mother Country for only a few months when a lady of his acquaintance presented him with Frank IV. Frank IV was a girl, christened Berenice. The state of coma which had ensnared Frank II for so long did not afflict Berenice, or any other of his descendants. Another tremendous adjustment in the shared consciousness had to be made. That also had its compensations; Frank was the first man ever really to appreciate the woman's point of view.

— Brian Aldiss

Full of years, Sir Frank's body died. The diphtheria which carried him off caused him as much suffering as it would have done an ordinary man; dying was not eased by his unique gift. He slid out into the long darkness — but his consciousness continued unabated in eight other bodies.

— Brian Aldiss

The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything. The more bodily habitations there were with which to sample, the more tantalizing the idea seemed: for many experiences, belonging only to one brief era, are never repeated, and may be gone before they are perceived and tasted.

— Brian Aldiss

Many Franks of the sixteenth generation were killed in the muck of the trenches, he died not once but many times, developing an obsessive dread of war which never left him. By the time the Americans entered the war, he was turning his many thoughts to politics.

— Brian Aldiss

Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin — nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation.

— Brian Aldiss

Many modifications in private and public life took place. Privacy ceasing to exist, all new houses were glass-built, curtains abolished, walls pulled down. Police went, the entire legal structure vanished overnight — a man does not litigate against himself. A parody of Parliament remained, to deal with foreign affairs, but party politics, elections, leaders in newspapers (even newspapers themselves) were scrapped.

— Brian Aldiss

Frank's chromosome conquered everywhere. Peace was guaranteed.By the end of another century's ruthless intermarriage, Russia and Asia were engulfed as thoroughly as Europe, and by the same loving methods. Billions of people: one consciousness.

— Brian Aldiss

Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.

— Brian Aldiss

To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important.

— Brian Aldiss

Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!

— Brian Aldiss

It [i.e., his look] held the fatal mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil.

— Brian Aldiss

In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.

— Brian Aldiss

One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time.

— Brian Aldiss

It’s a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn’t; it’s something that goes on inside us.

— Brian Aldiss

What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?

— Brian Aldiss

Let’s have a toast—to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!

— Brian Aldiss

That’s one thing about these religious boys—they reckon that if they are on God’s side, then the enemy must be on the devil’s, and so they have no qualms about giving it to ’em hot and strong.

— Brian Aldiss

“Sounds to me as if you want journalists,” Timberlane said.“No, sir, we require steady men with integrity. This is not a scoop, it’s a way of life.”

— Brian Aldiss

Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It’s patriotic to overconsume.

— Brian Aldiss

I’ve no objection to morality, except that it’s obsolete.

— Brian Aldiss

All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behavior and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all....Ah, well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?

— Brian Aldiss

As Flitch dryly remarked when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of ’em, but there ain’t any more of ’em growing up.”

— Brian Aldiss

“Are you a religious man, Joe?”Flitch pulled a face. “I leaves that sort of thing to women.”

— Brian Aldiss

The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.

— Brian Aldiss

All of which pointed to a moral that they should have learned long before, Arthur thought: Never trust a bunch of lousy politicians to do your thinking for you.

— Brian Aldiss

If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn’t be where we are now.

— Brian Aldiss

However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.

— Brian Aldiss

In Mrs. Swinton's garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David.

— Brian Aldiss

She had tried to love him.

— Brian Aldiss

Monica Swinton, twenty-nine, of graceful shape and lambent eye, went and sat in her living room, arranging her limbs with taste. She began by sitting and thinking; soon she was just sitting. Time waited on her shoulder with the maniac slowth it reserves for children, the insane, and wives whose husbands are away improving the world.

— Brian Aldiss

An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

— Brian Aldiss

The directors of Synthank were eating an enormous luncheon to celebrate the launching of their new product. Some of them wore the plastic face-masks popular at the time. All were elegantly slender, despite the rich food and drink they were putting away. Their wives were elegantly slender, despite the food and drink they too were putting away. An earlier and less sophisticated generation would have regarded them as beautiful people, apart from their eyes.

— Brian Aldiss

There have been mechanicals on the market with mini-computers for brains — plastic things without life, super-toys — but we have at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh.

— Brian Aldiss

Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?" "I wonder if time is good. I don't think Mummy likes time very much. The other day, lots of days ago, she said that time went by her. Is time real, Teddy?

— Brian Aldiss

"You and I are real, Teddy, aren't we?" The bear's eyes regarded the boy unflinchingly. "You and I are real, David." It specialized in comfort.

— Brian Aldiss

I'm no good, Teddy. Let's run away!""She's got Daddy. I've got nobody 'cept you, and I'm lonely.

— Brian Aldiss

Synthetic life-forms were less than ten years old, the old android mechanicals less than sixteen; the faults of their systems were still being ironed out, year by year.

— Brian Aldiss

He let out a yell of joy. They danced round the room. Pressure of population was such that reproduction had to be strict, controlled. Childbirth required government permission. For this moment, they had waited four years. Incoherently they cried their delight.

— Brian Aldiss

"Teddy — I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren't they?""First I'm going to have another rose!" Plucking a bright pink flower, he carried it with him into the house. It could lie on the pillow as he went to sleep. Its beauty and softness reminded him of Mummy.

— Brian Aldiss

If we can see our difficulties, there is a way of resolving them, or the hope of a way.

— Brian Aldiss

I'm lucky that SFWA has such a short memory. I was always the Young Turk, the gadfly. Part of the New Wave, although I didn't fit in there either! I spent years, and two histories, putting the so-called Old Guard in their place, and now I'm one of them!

— Brian Aldiss

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.

— Brian Aldiss

The day of the android has dawned.

— Brian Aldiss

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

— Brian Aldiss

One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.

— Brian Aldiss

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

— Brian Aldiss

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

— Brian Aldiss

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction — it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.

— Brian Aldiss

One of the objections I have against Campbell's Astounding was that there was too little love in it. It was a very loveless magazine. They never took enough account of the feeling that is always in SF.

— Brian Aldiss

Aldiss’s second law of thermo-linguistics states that what is most popular is rarely best and that what is best is rarely most popular.

— Brian Aldiss

All of which makes one feel that the centuries of science upon which our western culture is based have travelled unmarked through the popular mind. A surprising number of people are willing to junk the entire accumulation of knowledge since Ancient Greece after watching Uri Geller perform for five minutes on their twenty-three inch screen.

— Brian Aldiss

There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked.

— Brian Aldiss

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

— Brian Aldiss

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

— Brian Aldiss

I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.

— Brian Aldiss

Digging deep in a Martian desert So they covered it up again...

— Brian Aldiss

Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed — now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down...

— Brian Aldiss

The greatest human achievement is to fulfil one’s destiny.

— Brian Aldiss

The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

— Brian Aldiss

Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?

— Brian Aldiss