Chocky

Matthew's parents are worried. At eleven, he's much too old to have an imaginary friend, yet they find him talking to and arguing with a presence that even he admits is not physically there. This presence - Chocky - causes Matthew to ask difficult questions and say startling things: he speaks of complex mathematics and mocks human progress.

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris was born in 1903. He tried a number of careers including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, and started writing short stories in 1925. From 1930 to 1939 he wrote stories under different names, almost exclusively for American publications, while also writing detective novels. During the war he was in the Civil Service and then the Army. In 1946 he went back to writing stories and decided to try a modified form of science fiction, a form he called 'logical fantasy'. He died in March 1969.

Poet, playwright, critic, fiction and science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss was born in 1925 in Dereham, Norfolk, and is the author of more than seventy-five books. He lives in Oxford and was awarded an OBE in 2005 for Services to Literature