SCIENCE fiction author, artist and poet Brian Aldiss OBE, whose story inspired Steven Spielberg’s A.I. film, has died aged 92

Mr Aldiss was a prolific writer penning more than 40 science fiction novels and short story collections and editing anthologies.

His short story about an android boy – Supertoys Last All Summer Long – was eventually turned into a film by Spielberg after Mr Aldiss worked with Stanley Kubrick on the project for more than a decade.

In 2000 Mr Aldiss was awarded an honorary soctorate from Reading University and was given the title of ‘grandmaster’ from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

He was made an OBE by the Queen in 2005 for services to literature.

Brian Wilson Aldiss was born on August 18, 1925 in Dereham, Norfolk, above the family department store HH Aldiss, to parents Bill, who worked in the store, and Dot, the daughter of a builder who had risen from Victorian poverty to owning four houses.

He spent his first five years in living quarters fronting Dereham High Street before being sent to a series of nightmarish boarding schools.

At the age of 16 he was sent to boarding school at West Buckland School, Devon, where his parents had moved, and two years later joined the Army in 1943.

After training in Norfolk and India as a signalman he was sent to Burma, although the bombing of Hiroshima meant he never saw any action.

But he did take part in the liberation of Mandalay was later posted to Sumatra where British, Indian and Japanese troops fought against Indonesian insurgents.

He later ran a cinema there and fell in love with a Chinese woman but when he was posted to Hong Kong he never saw her again.

Post-war he found a job in Sanders booksellers in Oxford and married the owner's secretary Olive Fortescue in 1948.

They went on to have two children, Clive (1955) and Wendy (1959).

His first science fiction story, Criminal Record, was published in the magazine Science Fantasy in 1954 and was followed by several more including Not for an Age, which won a science fiction competition run by the Observer.

Following the publication of The Brightfount Diaries, a book of comic short stories based on bookshop life, he was offered the position of literary editor of the Oxford Mail.

The couple's marriage came to an end the same year daughter Wendy was born and Mr Aldiss fell into a Bohemian lifestyle in Jericho, often drinking, walking the streets at night and missing his children desperately.

But it was around this time his illustrious literary career began with Non-Stop – which earned him worldwide recognition.

Awarded the Hugo Award for Science Fiction in 1962 and the Nebula Award in 1965, Mr Aldiss's writings were well received by the critics and earned a strong following in the United States and in Britain as well as being widely translated into foreign languages.

By the end of the decade he was voted the most popular science fiction writer by the British Science Fiction Association.

He then met his second wife Margaret Manson, secretary to the editor of the Oxford Mail, who he married in 1965 and had two children with.

The pair lived in a spacious house just outside Oxford but they would both have affairs, leading Mr Aldiss to a nervous breakdown in 1974.

He became very ill with chronic fatigue and due to a tax miscalculation he was forced to sell his house to pay off his debts.

Once again in tough times his incredible gift for writing pulled him through and his Helliconia trilogy – set on a planet in which seasons last for generations – was considered a masterpiece.

Its success allowed him to buy a large house in Boars Hill where the family lived until the two children from his second marriage – Tim and Charlotte – flew the nest, and they downsized to a house in Headington.

A friend and drinking companion of Kingsley Amis and correspondent with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Mr Aldiss was a founding member of the Groucho Club in London and a judge on the 1981 Booker Prize.

His wife Margaret died in his arms in 1997 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, which led to his novel When the Feast is Finished – an account of her death.

He continued to live in Headington and wrote his last novel in 2013.

He died in the early hours of August 19, after celebrating his birthday with close family and friends, at his home in Headington.

He is survived by his partner, Alison Soskice; children Clive and Wendy from his first marriage, and Timothy and Charlotte from his second; a granddaughter, Lola; and six grandsons.