22 August 2017

Brian had been a member of the SoA for more than 50 years, serving as distinguished Chair of our Management Committee in 1978, and subsequently for many years on our Council.

He was a huge, prolific talent, deservedly recognised as a towering figure in science fiction since the 1960s, and settling firmly into the position of much-admired elder statesman during his later years.

Brian, during his career, won two Hugo awards and one Nebula award, was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, served as Vice-President of the international H.G. Wells Society and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His place in the history of English letters is assured, as a founding member of the Groucho Club and recipient of an OBE for Services to Literature – and as a writer who had so much to say, profoundly, not only about the distant future and distant planets, but about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as he lived them. He will be missed.