AN EXILE ON PLANET EARTH by Brian Aldiss (Bodleian, £19.99)

Paradoxically this series of essays by a man renowned for his science fiction writings looks back for answers rather than forward.Confronted by an alien landscape on his return from the Second World War, Aldiss was emotionally washed up on to the shores of the ironically named Paradise Square in Oxford.

The author drew inspiration from this physical and spiritual isolation though, and in 1959, when he was literary editor of the Oxford Times's sister paper the Oxford Mail, wrote Hothouse, where he imagined a mango tree covering the whole world.

Cultivating the wilderness captures the essence of Aldiss’s writing aspirations but crucially he does not want to be constrained by the sci-fi label. Aldiss is simply a writer and this conscious detachment from any specific genre is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that literary respectability does not lie in speculating about the future, as discovered by HG Wells.

The impact of a Martian invasion, as depicted in Wells’s War of the Worlds, has now been diluted by man’s knowledge of technology and greater global awareness.

Aldiss’s Super Toys Last All Summer Long was the inspiration for Spielberg’s film AI and was in many ways a metaphor for the absence of maternal love and family estrangement experienced by Aldiss growing up.

It’s the indefatigable human spirit described in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, though, that embodies man’s alienation and the power of the imagination to overcome adversity.

Aldiss’s artistic scope is sensitively captured throughout and reinforces his belief that speculative fiction can be as much about Gulliver's Travels as it is about Star Wars.