Life & Wisdom Quote by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss skewers a stubborn misconception with the breezy logic of a pub-room put-down: science fiction isn’t a trade journal in disguise, and treating it like one misses the point as completely as writing a ghost story to impress the dead. The line works because it’s both absurd and devastatingly clear. By swapping “scientists” with “ghosts,” he punctures the idea that a genre’s subject automatically defines its audience. It’s a joke, but it’s also a boundary marker: the reader science fiction is “for” is the human being trying to make sense of the present.

The subtext is a defense of SF as literature rather than technical forecasting. Aldiss, a major figure of Britain’s postwar SF scene and a champion of the New Wave, spent a career arguing that the genre’s real power lies in metaphor, estrangement, and social critique. His quip insists that the rockets and lab coats are props; the story is about fear, desire, politics, belief. Ghost stories aren’t written for ghosts because the supernatural isn’t the customer, it’s the instrument. Same with aliens, AI, time travel: devices to pressure-test ordinary life.

Context matters here: SF has long been policed by respectability on one side (“it should be scientifically accurate to count”) and by gatekeeping fans on the other (“it must obey the rules of the sandbox”). Aldiss needles both camps. He’s not dismissing science; he’s demoting it from master to collaborator. The punchline quietly reclaims SF as an art of human consequences, not expert credentials.