What was your earliest encounter with computers? Back in the 70s I bought the family a tennis game which we played on the TV screen for many a year. Around the same time, I visited the National Computer Laboratory. Among the new transistorised computers, they still had old thermionic valve machines. My first use of a new computer was to play Meteor Mission - where one had to land a rocket ship on the moon without running out of fuel. My wife and I bought our first IBM computer in the early 80s - it was a blind thing. Within a few years we were into Apple Macs, to which I've adhered ever since. I now have three of them, including the new Apple Powerbook G4. I can now write three books at once if I'm mad enough... and I am!
How well did the film AI capture the essence of your original short story? When a short story is expanded and transformed into a blockbuster movie, you can hardly expect the word "faithful" to enter the equation. Certainly the first hour of AI is surprisingly like my story ) but the idea of David, the android boy, wishing to be a "real" boy and going in quest of the Blue Fairy was not my idea.
Do you agree with William Gibson that "science fiction is impossible now as the future has arrived"? The future never arrives. It's always a case of jam tomorrow. Gibson was talking for effect, as we all do. The human race may have millions of years ahead of it, and many are the transformations it must go through.
Are text abbreviations and email shorthand changing our language? Texting and e-shorthand add to our language, much as slang does. We need neologisms to grasp new-coined developments. That the cadences of the old King James Bible are being lost is another matter: either people don't read the Bible or else they read new pallid versions.
How do you see the net and computers evolving? Eventually, computers will walk and talk in the shape of androids, which will resemble humans as closely as possible. At first these creatures will be neuters. However, under the pressures of an increasingly sexualised society, the demand will arise for androids with male and female attributes - and probably for androids with attributes of both sexes, hyper-hermaphrodites. There are endless possibilities here, which may cause the final break-up of the family unit.
Favourite gadgets? My brain - there's not another like it!
· Brian Aldiss' new book Super-State is published today by Orbit.
