Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss

Brian Aldiss spent his career writing science fiction that was always slightly off in a productive way: too literary for the hard SF crowd, too technical for the New Wave crowd, too British for the Americans. This Best SF retrospective collects the stories that prove the strategy worked, and reading them in order is the cleanest possible introduction to what Aldiss's sensibility was.

"Hothouse" is here, in its original story form, with the relentless evolutionary heat that the later fixup novel diluted. "Who Can Replace a Man" is here, and it remains one of the best post-apocalypse short stories ever written. The lesser-known stories are interesting in their own right. Aldiss is unusually willing, for a genre writer, to follow a strange premise to a strange ending without selling you a punchline.

Four stars. Recommended as a primer for any reader who knows the names but has never sat with the work. Take your time with each story.