Despite being badly under the weather, I had a great time speaking with Brian Aldiss at the Idler on Tuesday. We had a great turnout and nobody threw anything, so I think they enjoyed themselves.

Brian and I turned into an accidental double act: I was Lemsipped up to the eyeballs and giving short, focused answers to make sure I was coherent, while he was wandering around whatever question he was asked, though always being very entertaining.

It was a great honour to meet a writer as talented as him (read Greybeard if you haven’t) but it is the sheer breadth of his career that is really startling. He’s 89 this year, and The Friday Project will be putting out stories he wrote when he was 14. He explained the origin of several of his best-known works that evening, from Greybeard to the Helliconia trilogy and many others, and I couldn’t count the number of times he said of various books “the agent didn’t think it would sell” or “I left it in a drawer for ten years” etc. Yet he kept writing through it all, and still is.

It’s an easy thing to forget in our goldfish-memory culture, where someone can be massive, the butt of “where are they now?” jokes, and then forgotten with blinding speed. Almost all artists are discovered, forgotten, (re)discovered, and then fall out of fashion once more. The only real marker of success is that you’re still doing it, whether anyone is paying attention or not.