His new collection of essays is peppered with witty insights It begins with a piece about Salvador Dali. I took to the typewriter because it wouldn't answer back." His first novel, The Brightfound Diaries, was published in 1955. When his first science fiction novel, Nonstop, was published in 1957, he threw in his job and turned professional.His writing is characterised by a sharp sense of humour "You don't need to be earnest to be serious," he notes. I've had a quiet streak of subversion since I was a child."After the war he became a bookseller in Oxford "I was very nervous in those days. "I have calmed down now, but essentially I don't really belong in society. He's ambivalent about the dropping of "Little Boy" on Hiroshima.

At the time, still a teenager, he was about to go to almost certain death as the British forces attempted to take Japan's well-defended positions in Malaya. He'd always felt an outsider, but the war deepened that feeling "I am a Steppenwolf," he says. Most schoolboys are obsessed with sex, and some of the tales were full of erotic activities so tame by today's standards."Aldiss recently retrieved from its hiding place in the school grounds the tin box to which he consigned the stories when, in 1943, he left school for "the comparative safety and comfort of the British army".He fought in the Far East and was awarded the Burma Star. "I had already started writing science fiction and crime stories - re-writing Shakespeare as gangster stories - but by the age of 16 I was including mild pornography to titillate other boys.

When the family moved to Devon at the outbreak of war and Aldiss went to a friendlier school, he became better known for his pornography. A Norfolk shopkeeper's son, he was packed off at the age of seven to the first of a series of prep and boarding schools whose common feature was the bullying and beatings he received there. He was never able completely to forgive his mother for sending him away. "I felt I was being incarcerated in these places because I was a nuisance in the family."At first in school he was nicknamed the Professor, because he was bit of an inventor. "Maybe they'll get more attention then," he says, not looking as if he holds out much hope.Aldiss has been writing since childhood. "Anthony Burgess included my novel Life in the West among his 99 best novels, someone else called me the best prose writer in England, but in this country my four most recent novels - none of which was SF - were scarcely reviewed." The four will be republished next year as the Squire Quartet. Although he claims he writes because he is inarticulate, he is a fluent talker, his conversational manner an engaging mix of the casual and the rhetorical ("And furthermore, let me tell you this..." is the kind of thing).Not all his fiction is SF and it rankles that, while he has won pretty much every major SF award, his other fiction is overlooked.

A tall, slightly shambling man, his energy and enthusiasm belie his years. "I'm a creative force," he explains, only half joking.He is talking in the book-lined study of the Edwardian mansion just outside Oxford that he shares with Margaret, his wife of 30 years, and their four children. His latest collection of poetry, At the Caligula Hotel, came out from Sinclair Stevenson just before the axe fell on the imprint; Liverpool University Press have published The Detached Retina, his witty collection of essays; and HarperCollins will shortly publish The Secret of this Book, a collection of "stories, lies and anecdotes". He's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has been President of the Society of Authors, a Booker judge and a member of the Arts Council's literature panel.To celebrate his 70th birthday, he has three books published this year. All the dozens of novels and short story collections he has published in a 40-year professional writing career are still in print. He has edited numerous science fiction anthologies, written travel books, an autobiography, several volumes of essays and three collections of poetry The published bibliography of his work runs to 360 pages. They are certainly not generic SF, and people would enjoy them who have nothing to do with SF.