MANY years ago, I winced at Brian Aldiss’s polite but emphatic battering of a hapless presenter during a disastrous Radio 4 interview.

So I was nervous when The Third Alternative magazine commissioned me to interview Aldiss in 2003. Brutal with poorly framed questions, he was nevertheless generous with his time and profligate with his witty asides.

Disgusted with consumerism, corporate greed, religion and literary snobbery, he could also be scathing about science fiction, the genre for which he is best known: “Fans threatened to break my legs when they first read Billion Year Spree [Aldiss’s history of SF], illiterates that they were,” he revealed during the interview. “Of course things have settled down a bit over the years but I am still a constitutional non-joiner.”