Legendary author Brian W. Aldiss in what must be the most British thing ever, passed away the day after celebrating his 92nd birthday. In a career that saw him win every literary award imaginable (save the Nobel & Booker, and I could make a pretty good argument as to why he should have won the latter), Aldiss was a one-man literary movement. He gets lumped in with SF's New Wave of the early 1960s, but the fact of the matter is that Brian was already experimenting with using the tropes of SF to comment on current social conditions. From early classics like "The Saliva Tree" to the Hellconia Trilogy two decades later, Aldiss continued to push himself as a writer. His books of non-fiction are a delight, often overlooked, they shouldn't be, Aldiss was one of those writers who could write compellingly on any subject. I'd recently turned in a two-volume set collecting as much of his best short fiction as I could fit in (I really needed five or six books to do the project justice), and I'm totally bummed that he never got to see the finished product.