Brian Wilson Aldiss was a formative and influential writer and promoter of science fiction who rose to early acclaim in the 1950s. He was born on 18 August 1925 in Dereham, Norfolk, where his grandfather ran a drapery business. After the birth of his sister, Betty, Aldiss was sent away to boarding school: first to Framlingham College in Suffolk and then to West Buckland School in Devon. When Aldiss left school in 1943, he joined the Royal Signals and was posted to Burma before moving on to Hong Kong and Macau.

He moved to Oxford in 1947 where he began working at Sanders' bookshop. He first ventured into science fiction with his short story 'Criminal Record', published in Science Fantasy in July 1954. 'Not for an Age', a short story based in AD 2500, soon followed and won the Sunday Observer short story prize for fiction in December 1955. Inspired by his work as a bookseller, The Brightfount Diaries was published by Faber in 1955: Aldiss consequently left the shop to concentrate on writing.

A collection of short stories entitled Space, Time and Nathaniel followed in 1957 and his first science fiction novel, Non Stop, was published in 1958. He received a special Hugo award for 'most promising new author of the year' from the World Science Fiction Society in 1959. He was elected president of the British Science Fiction Association in 1960 and the following year he helped C.S. Lewis found the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group. He became editor of the Penguin Science Fiction series in 1961, culminating in The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus in 1973. From 1964, he edited and published SF Horizons, the first ever journal of science fiction criticism with fellow writer Harry Harrison; though only two issues were published, Aldiss and Harrison went on to co-edit The Year's Best Science Fiction from 1967 to 1976.

Aldiss received many awards for his writing in the 1960s and 1970s including: the 1962 Hugo Award for best short fiction for 'Hothouse', which began as a series of short stories in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; a Nebula Award for the best novella with The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths in 1966; and a British Science Fiction Association Award in 1972 for The Moment of Eclipse, a collection of short stories including 'Super-Toys Last All Summer Long' which was bought by Stanley Kubrick who planned to make a film adaptation of the story (later passed on to Steven Spielberg, it was released as A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001).

Aldiss's Billion Year Spree published in 1973 was a pioneering work on the history of science fiction and a major contribution to the field. It was revised and enlarged in 1986 as Trillion Year Spree, which won Aldiss his third Hugo Award. In 1979, Aldis was invited on a trip to China as part of an official 'Distinguished Persons Delegation' alongside Iris Murdoch and David Attenborough. In the early 1980s, Aldiss published his Helliconia trilogy. Giving fans an insight into his personal life, his substantial autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, was published in 1998.

Over the years, Aldiss held many prominent positions in the fields of science fiction and literature, becoming vice-president of the international H.G. Wells Society, co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1999 and awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Reading in 2000; inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004; awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2005; a guest on Desert Island Discs in 2007; and awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Liverpool in 2008.

Aldiss also published several collections of poetry, from Farewell to a Child in 1982 to Mortal Morning in 2011. His first solo art exhibition 'The Other Hemisphere', centring on his piece 'Metropolis', was held at the Jam Factory gallery in Oxford in 2010.

Aldiss married his first wife, Olive Mary Fortescue (1917-1994), in 1948: they had two children, Clive and Wendy. After their divorce in 1965, Aldiss married Margaret Ethel Christie Manson (1933-1997): they had two children, Timothy and Charlotte.