TALKS being staged today at the Oxford Literary Festival will pay tribute to science fiction writer Brian Aldiss.

The author, artist and poet, whose story inspired Steven Spielberg’s A.I. film, died aged 92 last year.

Mr Aldiss OBE, a former literary editor of the Oxford Mail and author of a string of British science fiction classics, lived in Headington.

Science fiction writer Christopher Priest will host a celebration of Mr Aldiss’s life and work in the Weston Lecture Theatre from 2pm.

And at 4pm, in the same venue, fantasy author Philip Pullman and journalist Claire Armitstead will explore the place of science fiction in the literary canon as a tribute to Mr Aldiss.

His ‘Supertoys’ short stories were adapted for the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence on which he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick for over a decade before its completion by Spielberg in 2001.

And his novel Frankenstein Unbound was also madeinto a film by Roger Corman.

Mr Aldiss was born in Norfolk on August 18, 1925 and died shortly after celebrating his 92nd birthday.

Having moved to Oxford shortly after the Second World War as a bookseller he became the literary editor of the Oxford Mail from 1958 to 1969.

A friend and drinking companion of Kingsley Amis, and correspondent with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, Mr Aldiss was a founding member of the Groucho Club in London and a judge on the 1981 Booker Prize. He was awarded the OBE in 2005.

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