Life & Wisdom Quote by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss treats “feedback” the way a seasoned novelist treats a plot twist: as gratification, yes, but also as evidence that the story has escaped its author. Calling it “a pleasant thing” is deliberately modest, almost wry. Coming from a prolific science fiction writer who spent decades being typecast, reviewed, and periodically rediscovered, the understatement reads as self-protection. Praise can be fickle; correspondence is tangible. A letter is a physical artifact that says: your book landed somewhere.

The real charge is in the double “unexpected.” Aldiss isn’t bragging about fan mail so much as mapping literature’s weird distribution network. The best writing doesn’t just find “the right audience”; it ricochets. “Unexpected people in unexpected places” suggests readers outside the assumed circuit of genre insiders and London literary culture: soldiers, prisoners, librarians in far-off towns, engineers, students behind political borders. In a pre-social-media world, letters were the analog algorithm, surfacing the strange demographics of influence one envelope at a time.

Subtext: for a writer, feedback is less about validation than about contact. It punctures the solitude of the job and confirms that the work has a life beyond reviews and sales figures. There’s also a quiet democratic impulse here. Aldiss, who often wrote about the future’s disorientations, is noting a present-day marvel: language travels without asking permission, forming momentary communities between strangers. The “pleasant” part isn’t applause; it’s the proof of reach, the shock of being read by someone you never imagined when you sat down to write.