"Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem"
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Aldiss smuggles a quiet provocation into a plain sentence: creativity isn’t magic, it’s work with a target. By defining it “in part” as problem-solving, he deflates the romantic cult of the artist-as-mystic without fully surrendering to the engineer’s fantasy that art is just optimization. That hedge matters. It keeps the door open for accident, play, obsession, and all the irrational fuel that drives a writer to the desk, while still insisting that the end product must answer something.
The line also reveals a novelist’s bias about how art actually gets made. Stories are machines for resolving pressure: a character’s desire, a society’s contradiction, a reader’s hunger for pattern. Even the most surreal fiction has a problem it’s trying to crack: how to make the impossible feel coherent, how to give a new idea emotional teeth, how to smuggle a critique past the reader’s defenses. In science fiction, Aldiss’s home terrain, the “problem” is often civilization-scale: what technology does to intimacy, what progress does to meaning, what tomorrow exposes about today. Creativity becomes a way of thinking in scenarios, of stress-testing reality by inventing alternatives.
Subtextually, Aldiss is arguing against the lazy alibi of inspiration. If creativity is a solution, it can be evaluated: does it fit, does it surprise, does it unlock something we couldn’t see before? That doesn’t reduce art to utility; it raises the stakes. The artist isn’t merely expressing themselves. They’re answering a demand, sometimes self-imposed, sometimes cultural: make sense, make beauty, make trouble, make a way through.
The line also reveals a novelist’s bias about how art actually gets made. Stories are machines for resolving pressure: a character’s desire, a society’s contradiction, a reader’s hunger for pattern. Even the most surreal fiction has a problem it’s trying to crack: how to make the impossible feel coherent, how to give a new idea emotional teeth, how to smuggle a critique past the reader’s defenses. In science fiction, Aldiss’s home terrain, the “problem” is often civilization-scale: what technology does to intimacy, what progress does to meaning, what tomorrow exposes about today. Creativity becomes a way of thinking in scenarios, of stress-testing reality by inventing alternatives.
Subtextually, Aldiss is arguing against the lazy alibi of inspiration. If creativity is a solution, it can be evaluated: does it fit, does it surprise, does it unlock something we couldn’t see before? That doesn’t reduce art to utility; it raises the stakes. The artist isn’t merely expressing themselves. They’re answering a demand, sometimes self-imposed, sometimes cultural: make sense, make beauty, make trouble, make a way through.
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| Topic | Deep |
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