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Aickman, Robert

Entry updated 10 November 2025. Tagged: Author, Editor.

(1914-1981) UK journalist, campaigner and author almost none of whose significant work – the tales he usually referred to in subtitles and various comments as "Strange Stories" – remotely resembles sf, though much of it can be described as Fantastika. The power of this work derives from a consummate avoidance of any assured generic status; though many of his tales can be approached as ghost stories (even when no ghost, or any other Supernatural Creature, appears in what may seem a haunted world), and as fulfilling any broad-church definition of "weird fiction". The author most likely to have influenced his technique may be Walter de la Mare (1873-1956). Though some of his early life remains undescribed, he seems to have begun publishing work of genre interest with "The Trains", "The Insufficient Answer" and "The View", the three stories he contributed to his first book of fiction, We Are For the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (coll 1951) with Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014). They are the work of a writer already mature writer in full control of material, and although his most profound tales date from his last years, he never worked out an apprenticeship in public: he seemed fully formed – fully armed – from the first, an impression strengthened by his autobiographies, The Attempted Rescue (1966; exp 2001) and The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (1986; much exp 2014).

In an essay contributed to Supernatural Fiction Writers (anth 1985 2vols ed E F Bleiler; rev 2003 ed Richard Bleiler), John Clute advanced the exploratory hypothesis that Aickman's tales could be read, in Jung-inflected terms, as dramas of mid-life crisis suffered by (almost always) male protagonists who had failed – whose attempted rescue had failed – in the task of re-assembling the "heroic" selfhood of youth into what might be called a kind of chivalry: a joining of aspects of self with which to continue living, to find the world readable, and to age properly. The indecipherable wastelands in which his best stories are unfolded, like "Compulsory Games" (in Frights, anth 1976, ed Kirby McCauley; also Tales of Love and Death coll 1977), can in this light be understood as dramas of the unending Wrongness of the fate of remaining incoherent: ghosts haunt these unspeakably estranged wastelands, and woods from which there is no exit [for Wrongness above and Into the Woods below, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below].

Stories of note include: "Ringing the Changes" (in The Third Ghost Book, anth 1955, ed Cynthia Asquith), in which the risen dead paralyse a dangerously moribund marriage; "The Visiting Star" (1952 Tatler); "Into the Wood" in Sub Rosa: Strange Tales (coll 1968); "Pages From a Young Girl's Journal" (February 1973 F&SF), which won a 1975 World Fantasy Award; "The Hospice" in Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories (coll 1975); "The Fetch" (in New Tales of Terror, anth 1980, ed Hugh Lamb; also in Intrusions coll 1980); and "Mark Ingestre – The Customer's Tale" (in Dark Forces, anth 1980, ed Kirby McCauley). But there are few weak stories. Perhaps the only tale whose protagonist achieves a state of chivalry which allows him a Perception of lived reality is a novella, "The Stains" (in New Terrors 1, anth 1980, ed Ramsey Campbell), whose protagonist can see that he is dying and that the nymph he meets and loves is escorting him to the grave. In the end, she takes him Into the Woods, into the coffin-like dwelling of her father, who is the natural world, the closest to a male Gaia Aickman would ever allow himself, and the protagonist realizes that he is happy here at the end, and for a time will be able to "count the good things only, as does a sundial". This tale won a 1981 British Fantasy Award.

Aickman wrote three novels, all with female protagonists at the verge of adulthood – though none of them could be described as Young Adult fictions – all of which tacitly propound the thesis that "appearances are true": that the appearance of the world tells us who we are. The Late Breakfasters (1964), is an uneasy fantasticated farce; The Model (1987) carries its protagonist, who longs to be a ballerina, with supernatural rapidity into a doll's-house world where she triumphs. Go Back at Once (written by 1975; 2020) approaches sf as closely as Aickman would ever wish to get. Caught up in the aftermath disarray of 1920, two young girls, both inexplicitly virgin (see Sex), find themselves in the Ruritanian Island of Trino in the Adriatic, ruled invisibly from a high tower by an omnicompetent author named Vittore, a figure unmistakably based on Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), whose own annexation of Fiume in 1920 was similarly evanescent. The Utopia Vittore founds, organized according to the rules of Music, is phantasmagorically inconsequential. A Commedia dell'Arte costumery deliberately suffuses the tale; the girls – one of whom experiences this world through directive dreams as an Arabian Nightmare [for this, Commedia dell'Arte and Dolls see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] – survive the gradual loss of most of their clothing, though one of them sleeps with Vittore in a dinghy after Trino collapses, tacitly but clearly adumbrating the collapse of European civilization; through the chinks of a novel so decorated and so frivolous can be glimpsed prolepses of a later time. Visible influences on Go Back at Once include authors like Ivy Compton-Burnett, Wyndham Lewis, Mervyn Peake, Evelyn Waugh; the author whose work seems to shape the tale most fundamentally may be Luigi Pirandello. [JC]

Robert Fordyce Aickman

born London: 27 June 1914

died London: 26 February 1981

works (selected)

  • The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) [hb/nonpictorial]
  • The Model (New York: Arbor House, 1987) [hb/Jill Karla Schwarz]
  • Go Back at Once (Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2020) [completed 1975: hb/Stephen J Clark]

collections

nonfiction

links

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