Cretan Teat

Description

A ribald tale from Britain's best-love Science Fiction writer. The Cretan Teat is a bawdy novel, telling the extraordinary tale a Byzantine painting of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus. This false icon gets adopted by the people - and so becomes instrumental in the downfall of mankind. This is a story where the narrator - the author - is regularly caught with his trousers down. It is at once funny and important, a post-modern text reminiscent of Pirandello, where sexcapades brush shoulders with the end of the world.

Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story 'Criminal Record', which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection. Several of Aldiss' books have been adapted for the cinema; his story 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons. Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.

'For decades, Brian Aldiss has been among our most prolific and consistently stylish writers.' THE TELEGRAPH