Interactive family trees for Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy: who’s related to whom across Spring, Summer and Winter, with a spoiler switch.
The Helliconia Family Tree
Author: Tim Aldiss
Tim Aldiss is a seasoned SEO and digital marketing expert with over 18 years of experience. As the SEO Partner at Anything is Possible and founder of ThinkSearch, he has led complex SEO campaigns for clients like Imperial College London, HP, and Virgin Holidays. Tim is passionate about the evolving landscape of AI in marketing and actively integrates AI tools into SEO strategies. He also launched The Aldiss Award to honor excellence in world-building across literature and gaming, celebrating his father Brian Aldiss's legacy. Based in Hove, UK, Tim balances his professional pursuits with family life and a love for campervanning.
Brian Aldiss, Supertoys, and the Long Shadow of Kubrick’s A.I.
Few short stories in science fiction have cast a longer and more curious shadow than Brian Aldiss’s Supertoys Last All Summer Long. First published in 1969, the story’s quiet, melancholic exploration of artificial consciousness would eventually become the seed of one of cinema’s most legendary unrealised projects: Stanley Kubrick’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. A lecture by […]
And the winner is… Rogba Payne for The Dances of Shadows
The Aldiss Award awards ceremony. At the start of the Saturday evening’s award ceremony at this year’s World Fantasy Convention I (Tim, Brian’s son) was proud to be able to stand up and introduce not only the concept of an award for world-building in speculative fiction, but to also announce the winner of this, the […]
The Aldiss Award Shortlist 2025: Celebrating Excellence in World-Building Across Speculative Fiction & Gaming
Honouring the Legacy of Brian Aldiss, Celebrating Extraordinary Realms in Science Fiction & Fantasy We’re delighted to reveal the shortlist for the inaugural Aldiss Award for World Building in speculative fiction. Our Chair of Judges, Allen Stroud, said: “The short list reflects our determination to find the very best stories that fire the imagination of […]
AI Reads AI
Supertoys Last All Summer Long Read by Brian AI Aldiss The Aldiss Literary Estate, The Aldiss Award, Curtis Brown & Robin Strauss Agency are proud and excited to announce a series of special events and publications to celebrate the centenary of author, poet, editor, science fiction Grand Master, multiple Nebula & Hugo award winner, and […]
Friendships: Philip K Dick
In one of his essays, Joseph Brodsky, talking about Osip Mandelstam, says this about our lives: Any poet, no matter how much he writes, expresses in his verse, physically or statistically speaking, at most one tenth of his life’s reality. The rest is normally shrouded in darkness. Is this admirable remark what we feel about […]
Friendships: J.R.R. Tolkien
Mention has been made of the Inklings. This was the literary group which met frequently in the aforementioned pub, The Bird and Baby. The leading members were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. One was accustomed to seeing Tolkien bustling along in the Broad, clutching a copy of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer. Possibly he was then – […]
Friendships: Marie Bashkirtseff
Brian’s UK publishers The Friday Project is curating a series of short anecdotes that Brian has written about some of the many literary greats that he has been fortunate enough to know and meet over his illustrious career, and others that he has simply admired. In a short series here on Brian’s blog we publish […]
New NASA Exoplanet Travel Posters
(This post was originally published on aldissandmore.com) How about these beautiful pieces of poster artwork commissioned by NASA themselves to help inspire a generation to stay on board with the space discovery missions being run by NASA. Commissioned to look like art deco 1930’s era classic poster-work they certainly evoke memories of some classic science […]
Friendships: Aldous Huxley
Brian’s UK publishers The Friday Project is curating a series of short anecdotes that Brian has written about some of the many literary greats that he has been fortunate enough to know and meet over his illustrious career, and others that he has simply admired. In a short series here on Brian’s blog we publish […]