Paperback: When the residents of Old Headington, a leafy suburb of Oxford, learn that a local pub is being knocked down to make room for a mosque, they find their normally liberal views overthrown by deep-seated prejudices.
Looking on with great interest is Justin Haddock (or, as he prefers, Haydock), a retired academic in his eighties. Inspired by these developments, Haddock begins work on a new thesis about the dangers of religion and the role of Chance in society - only to have both subjects start to impact on his own life more closely than he could have expected.
Shot through with characteristic brilliance and wit, Comfort Zone (2013) proves that even sixty years since the publication of his first novel, Brian Aldiss still has something important to say.
About the author: Poet, playwright, critic, fiction and science-fiction writer Brian W(ilson) Aldiss was born on 18 August 1925 in Dereham, Norfolk, and is the author of more than 75 books. He died on 19 August 2017 just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.
He was educated at Framlingham College, Suffolk, and West Buckland School, Devon, and served in the Royal Signals between 1943 and 1947. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller in Oxford for almost a decade. This experience provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955), a volume of short stories. His first science fiction novel, Non-Stop, was published in 1958 while he was working as literary editor of the Oxford Mail, a post he held between 1958 and 1969. His many prize-winning science fiction titles include Hothouse (1962), which won the Hugo Award, The Saliva Tree (1966), which was awarded the Nebula, and Helliconia Spring (1982), which won both the British Science Fiction Association Award and the John W Campbell Memorial Award. He edited SF Horizons: A Magazine of Criticism and Comment with his friend, the science fiction novelist Harry Harrison, and he has edited numerous anthologies, including Introducing SF: A Science Fiction Anthology (1964). He has also written science fiction criticism, most recently,The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy (1995), as well as introductions to classic novels including Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1983). Brian Aldiss's autobiographical fiction includes The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) and A Soldier Erect (1971), and he has also written three volumes of autobiography, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's: A Writing Life (1990), The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman (1998) and When the Feast is Finished (1999). He is the author of several poetry collections, including Home Life with Cats (1992); A Plutonian Monologue on His Wife's Death (2000) and A Prehistory of Mind (2008). Several of his books, including Frankenstein Unbound (filmed 1990), have been adapted for the cinema. His story, 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long', was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. His book Jocasta (2005), is a reworking of Sophocles' classic Theban plays, Oedipus Rex and Antigone.
Cultural Breaks (2006), published to coincide with his eightieth birthday, is a collection of short fictions which includes commentaries on his work by his peers. In 2011, a selection of his poetry, Mortal Morning, was published. His latest novels were Walcot (2009) and Comfort Zone (2013) and he was working on a long novel set in Russia in the eighteenth century. His publishers, Harper Voyager, reprinted everything Aldiss wrote in the sixties, along with a collection of stories written in his teenage years, Whip Donovan, to celebrate his ninetieth birthday.
Brian Aldiss was the recipient of numerous international awards for science-fiction writing including a Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and a Prix Jules Verne (Sweden). He lived in Oxford and was awarded an OBE in 2005 for Services to Literature.
Rating: 5/5
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