Man in His Time

Twenty-two classic science fiction stories spanning the first three decades of the Science Fiction Grand Master’s career.

Features “Super-Toys Last All Summer,” the short story that inspired the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

“Britain’s most versatile and durable and consistently most interesting science-fiction writer presents his own personal ‘best of’: 22 splendid tales. . . . To Aldiss, the human dimension has always been more important than hardware or fireworks—which is why his best stories have a timeless quality weaving intelligence, emotion, and inventiveness.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Brian W. Aldiss was a science fiction author “in competition with no one but himself” (The New York TimesBook Review). In this collection he shows why, offering up twenty-two stories from the first three decades of his career, encompassing a stunning range of ideas, moods, and styles.

In the title story we find a man, recently back from an expedition in space, who lives 3.3077 minutes in the future. A meteor shakes things up in a quiet English town in “The Saliva Tree,” an homage to H. G. Wells, and which earned Aldiss the Nebula Award in 1965. A giant lizard-like alien comes to Earth in “Heresies of the Huge God,” and while some believe it is a monster, others worship it. A mother tries to connect with her son through the help of a robot intermediary in “Super-Toys Last All Summer.” Unhappy with the state of his life, a man ventures back in time to hunt dinosaurs in “Poor Little Warrior!” Robots have an existential crisis in “Who Can Replace a Man?” and men travel to Mars to take a picture of the planet’s tallest volcano in “The Difficulties in Photographing Nix Olympica.”

Although the stories in this collection were originally published in the 1950s,’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, they remain just as gripping today. Each conveys a fascinating idea for readers to ponder, and together, they make a perfect introduction to one of British science fiction’s greatest authors.