David Redd sold his first stories to Michael Moorcock at New Worlds SF and later appeared in many other magazines, including F&SF, If, Amazing, Fantastic, Asimov’s SF, and Interzone.
One of his other claims to fame is that he appeared on the television quiz program Who Wants to be a Millionaire with his wife Meriel in 2001: they won £16,000.
He was a civil engineer by profession but is now retired. He has a son and a daughter.
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My first contact with David was as the editor of Spectrum SF (a now defunct semi-pro magazine that ran from 2000-2002) where I bought and published a couple of his stories. Around a year ago, I bought some SF magazines on Ebay and recognised the return name and address on the package and got back in touch. After we exchanged a few emails I asked him if he would be like to do an interview. He agreed, and it was conducted by email from the middle of August to the end of October 2018.
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I’d like to take this opportunity to thank David for the time and effort he put into this interview/conversation/cross-examination/forced march.
—Paul Fraser

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Q.1 I’ve noticed from your postal address(es) that you’ve been living in the same part of Wales for years now. Is this where you family comes from?

A.1 I was born in 1946 in Cardigan, West Wales, the location being an accident of World War II. My father was stationed there as a “backroom boy” developing projectiles and explosives for our Armed Forces. (His works diary for 1944-45 is now a CreateSpace book, more for my family than for others.) Dad’s family was from Port Talbot, originally from Somerset; I’m proud that one great-great-uncle was an engine-driver on the Brendon Hills Mineral Line. My mother was a teacher from the coal-mining valleys with ancestors from all over Wales—Abergele and Clocaenog in the north, Bala and Montgomery in mid-Wales, and Cwm Cych near Cardigan. So our family was basically Welsh by background and inclination. After the usual post-war shuffling about we came to Haverfordwest in 1949, Dad teaching chemistry, and with only brief intermissions I’ve lived here ever since.

Q.2 So do you speak Welsh? You mention that your Dad taught Chemistry—what was your mother’s subject?

A.2 Years ago, the children of a Welsh-speaking mother and English-speaking father were generally raised as monoglot English. This was thought to improve academic and career prospects. Times have changed but too late for me, still needing subtitles for full understanding of Welsh-language TV. My mother’s bilingual upbringing gave her no trouble gaining a B.Sc. (Hons) in Biology or in teaching it.

Q.3 Can you tell us a little about your personal history up until 1966 (the date of your first sale to New Worlds)?

A.3 Personal history? You’ll recognise this pattern. I was a bookish only child who liked space stories and disliked school work, with the usual result. I gravitated into working for the County Council because little else in 1960s Pembrokeshire offered any prospects. My teenage interests of films, pop music, hiking and no organised sport were not good career training. One escape was writing my own little stories. This continued after I joined the Pembrokeshire County Council Roads and Bridges Department. Increasing contacts with sf fans led to meeting several beginning writers in London (1965) including a likeable lad called Terry Pratchett (published 1963) who was two years younger than me. After this my desultory attempts at magazine submissions became more determined. Within a year Michael Moorcock had accepted two of my stories for New Worlds and rushed the second into print ahead of the first. So here we are, Paul. 1966.

Q.4 I’d like to ask you a few questions about those New Worlds years as it is a period I am particularly interested in but, before that, can you tell us what your formative SF reading was (including any magazines), and whether any of it was an influence?

A.4 I was inspired by occasional fantastic material in comics such as Mickey Mouse Weekly or Rocket, and of course “Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future” in Eagle. I didn’t read many sf magazines until hooked on them in my teens. However the public libraries introduced me to children’s science fiction from Patrick Moore, William F. Temple and Angus MacVicar. I progressed via John Russell Fearn and Jon J. Deegan to the adult shelves with John Wyndham and my then-favourite Eric Frank Russell. A somewhat iffy trajectory by the standards of a proper literary education, which may explain much. Influences? Angus MacVicar’s “Lost Planet” adventures inspired some early world-building, but otherwise I gained more from traditional children’s authors such as Arthur Ransome, C.S. Lewis and Tove Jansson. That’s a lot of names, but I did read an awful lot. Too much, too young?

Q.5 That’s quite a mixture of writers you have there. What was it that you gained from the childrens’ authors?

A.5 Believable people and atmosphere—unlike genre sf, where characters and feelings were subordinate to the ideas.

Q.6 As you’ve already mentioned, you sold your first two stories, Prisoners of Paradise (New Worlds #167, October 1966, reprinted in New Worlds Quarterly #1, 1971) and The Way to London Town (New Worlds #164, July 1966) to Michael Moorcock. What was the magazine scene like for new writers at the time?

A.6 In the mid-Sixties, our “magazine scene” was small but quite varied and promising! New Worlds was the controversial cutting edge, at Science Fantasy anything could happen, and New Writings was a new format for traditionalists. Even with only three markets, we would-be sf writers were almost spoilt for choice—all three editors were receptive to newcomers. We felt invited. Remember, this was the Swinging Sixties, when the example of the Beatles appearing from nowhere to conquer the world was still fresh and inspirational. And when you’re a teenager you think you can do anything. So we gave it a go.

Q.7 Were you all submitting to Moorcock, Bonfiglioli (at Science Fantasy) and Carnell (at New Writings in SF) only, or did you also submit to the American market (your next four stories appeared in F&SF and If, so I know this happened eventually)?

A.7 Some of us hopefuls did also attempt the USA magazines, carefully enclosing a couple of International Reply Coupons (the return-postage vouchers available then). In at least one case I actually got a manuscript back with a brief note of encouragement, thank you Mr. Pohl. That was nice. But no sales, not then.

Q.8 Can you remember what story Pohl commented on?

A.8 My manuscripts submitted to Pohl and Carnell were early efforts, not up to publishable standard. When I learned what publishable standard felt like I soon burned those stories amongst many others. I’m sure nothing valuable was lost to humanity.

Q.9 What were the different editors like to deal with?

A.9 I was put off Carnell when a 5,000-word story came back with the note “We do not use stories under 3,000 words.” Also—and I apologise to his ghost for this—the anthologies felt old-fashioned. Bonfiglioli was engaging but erratic (his eccentricities could extend to losing manuscripts under his bed or wherever), and after a while I gave up there too. No hard feelings. In contrast, Michael Moorcock was wonderful both as an unseen editor and later as a person—welcoming, friendly, generous with time and advice, not averse to being visited at home occasionally, idealistic and hard-working and committed to his art as writer and editor. His story “Behold the Man” may have been a personal statement, but also demonstrated the quality others should aim for. He led by example.
Incidentally, and perhaps not for the interview, I don’t entirely agree with your views on New Worlds 142.¹ To me, Moorcock’s editorial debut seemed really strong. That excellent Ballard serial (afterwards I bought the book); the pointer to William S. Burroughs; the impressive Brunner story confirming his upward swing; the reappearance of a previously very minor Barrington Bayley clearly flexing his muscles for better. All this made a decisive change of direction from Carnell’s era despite having familiar contributors. Credit also to Aldiss for attempting something Sixties, even if it wasn’t quite what we or (I suspect) he wanted. Everything was worthwhile, including one of Jim Cawthorn’s best covers.
As for Brunner’s “The Last Lonely Man” seeming less than brilliant to you today, isn’t that a matter of context as always? Take the example of Theodore Sturgeon: nowadays the pulp apprenticeship behind More Than Human is more noticeable, as Silverberg has discovered recently, while for Venus Plus X its status as a first pointer towards a trans society may now outweigh initial hostile reactions. The context always changes the view. (Ditto outside SF of course. In my check-through pile of old vinyl I find the Marino Marini Quartet, an Italian act which played the London Palladium and had three UK hits. Today their version of “Mustafa” basically sounds quaint for its proto-Europop, but in 1959 it would have seemed exotic for its Eastern melody.²) Similarly, “The Last Lonely Man” impressed us in 1964 not for its old Fifties baggage but for its new Sixties virtues. A strong component of a killer first issue.

Q.10 I’m not sure whether context is my problem with the Brunner—I just found the idea of letting a complete stranger into your head highly unlikely verging on ridiculous, but I realise I am in the minority here (I’ve heard other people praise the story, and it appeared in Ghod knows how many anthologies).
As for Barry Bayley, I much preferred his later stories, Integrity (New Worlds #144) and The Ship of Disaster (New Worlds #151). That latter effort may be his best short story.

A.10 Barry Bayley by the mid-Sixties had a foot-high stack of unpublished manuscripts—I saw it—of variable quality; I think Moorcock and later Charles Platt rescued the best, presumably including The Ship of Disaster. Strange that Carnell must have rejected several Bayley gems while accepting his more ordinary stories submitted as by “P.F. Woods”.

Q.11 How did you come to see those manuscripts?

A.11 I visited Charles Platt once or twice and they were on his table.  (He recalls them as “unfinished” rather than unsold, which surprises me.) Charles was clearly talented and was committed to New Worlds. Other details are lost from memory except his party-line telephone; to ring out he had to wait for an indication of a call upstairs, then jiggle his own telephone frantically to catch a loose end on the stream of electrons as it looped past. Or more usually miss catching it.

Q.12 Coming back to your first two publications, Prisoners of Paradise and The Way to London Town, I note that they both use conventional themes—the first story has an alien on another planet come into contact with a human astronaut—the alien is later (spoiler) rejected as contaminated by its hive mind; the second story is a time travel piece, as was its prequel/sequel Nancy (Fantastic, February 1971).
By comparison, your next story, and first of many for F&SF, Sundown (December 1967), is much harder to pin down. It uses fantasy language (dryad, fur-sprite, troll) to describe the narrator and her companions although they actually have paranormal powers (telepathy, telekinesis, etc.). It is also, eventually, a much darker piece that concerns an external threat to these creatures, a man entering their territory to obtain “living rock”.
More generally, there is a distinct jump in quality with this story—was this a natural evolution or was there something else going on (I thought this might have been to do with your attendance at the Milford writers’ workshop but I see from my internet stalking that you went to that later on, in 1972)?

A.12 The “something else” going on was Michael Moorcock, and me trying to do my best for the best editor around. In 1966 I lived in London for a while and wrote a lot. I wanted to see what I could do in SF and how well I could do it. Why was my Sundown written in a style “hard to pin down” as you put it? Because (deep breath) I meant the experience to be both science and fantasy, e.g. artificial satellites having astrological significance and so forth. Mutually incomprehensible ingredients. I also drafted a companion story describing alien incursion into our normal countryside, but after its natural home of SF Impulse [the 1966-67 retitled Science Fantasy] folded I laid the typescript aside, and eventually destroyed it as substandard. Any jump in quality you perceive with Sundown was due to hard work and good advice on the writing which preceded it.

Q.13 Your second F&SF story, A Quiet Kind of Madness (May 1968), has a very similar theme. In this one a woman rescues a telepathic polar bear-like creature which later communicates to her, in her sleep, that there is a “land-without-men” and, in a further dream, a tunnel that leads there. Before she can leave with the bear, male hunters arrive and once again cause problems.
Why did you use the same theme in two consecutive stories?

A.13 I liked exploring variations on a theme but (there’s always a but) found this easier in separate stories. Hence my discarded mirror-image of Sundown, and my Prisoners of Paradise being something of a trial run for a later story. As for A Quiet Kind of Madness, I deliberately concentrated on the character study rather than on any wider culture-clash as in Sundown. You ask, what attracted me to the common theme of intrusion? Chosen almost instinctively I suppose, as the most basic threat to the female protagonists I favoured (along with snow) at that time. In a way my best stories of the mid-Sixties were all dreamlike sequences built around shared loci of imagination.

Q.14 The first of your stories for Fred Pohl’s If magazine (which appeared around the same time as the ones in F&SF), Sunbeam Caress (March 1968), is that “later story”. It features the same kind of alien light columns as in your first accepted story Prisoners of Paradise, but this time they are invaders of a far future Earth dominated by a multi-species hive-mind dominated by ants, but which includes humans, fruit bats, etc. There is also a female character in this one but she has the most minor of roles (the hive-mind essentially uses humans as servants), and the story is almost completely focused on the hive-mind investigation of the light columns, the strange ceremonies the latter conduct with crystals that are mobile and seem sentient, and the threat that both of these may pose.
There are other elements in the story too, including a race of underwater men who have vanished (possibly into the future through time-mirages that occasionally appear), and by the end of the story we also have sentient stars and the revelation that the light columns want bring consciousness to the planet Earth itself!
What struck me about the story’s relentless ideation and lack of characters is that it harks back to a pre-Golden Age type of SF story, and this probably makes it one of the most non-New Wave works you could have read at the time. Was this referencing of an earlier type of story a conscious choice, or was this another dreamlike progression?

A.14 To answer all that, may I explain how the story was developed both before and after a break for Prisoners of Paradise? My original synopsis for Sunbeam Caress featured an international cast of fairly standard scientist-investigators, but that must have felt unsatisfactory. In a new synopsis I jettisoned the comfortably familiar characters, and focussed on pure strangeness.
So there was no deliberate intent to create either a dream or a pre-Golden Age narrative. (I only later discovered similar territory in Frank Belknap Long’s 1934-5 “Last Men” stories.)
I’m rather amused, or bemused, by your calling Sunbeam Caress “one of the most non-New Wave works you could have read at the time”. It was Michael Moorcock, the most deeply New Wave of editors, who literally hand-picked Sunbeam Caress for New Worlds. In September 1966 at 87a Ladbroke Grove I showed him several outlines of potential stories, and he—in the same month that New Worlds published his Nebula-winning Behold the Man—said I should write Sunbeam Caress. So I did. You may think I departed so far from conventional 50s-60s sf that my experiment reached the furthest end of the literary spectrum and came out the other side.
Not everything worked. I under-used the titanomoles.
After I submitted the story, New Worlds went under [Moorcock later published the magazine himself]. Michael Moorcock suggested that I send Sunbeam Caress to Frederik Pohl with a covering letter from him. True kindness. Pohl paid me 1ȼ a word as a beginner, numbered the chapters, and organised illustrations by the wonderful Virgil Finlay.³ I owe everybody huge thanks for their showcasing this story.

Q.15 That “non-New Wave” description wasn’t meant (entirely) mischievously, and I’m pleasantly surprised at Moorcock’s involvement with the story—probably because I originally thought that it and the other one you placed with If had bounced from the large-format New Worlds because it wasn’t their cup of tea. Conversely, anyone reading the Compact Books period New Worlds would realise that Moorcock was an editor with catholic tastes—as well as publishing more progressive material he also used at least one of Edward Mackin’s ‘Hek Belov’ stories, and reprinted a couple of old-school pulp stories by Charles Harness, although that writer’s Time Trap (Astounding August 1948) and Stalemate in Space (Planet Stories Summer 1949) were more complex and accomplished pieces than their contemporaries. I believe Moorcock was also instrumental in getting Harness’s almost forgotten novella The Rose published in book form at Compact Books. And those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
Anyway, here is my first and most important follow-up question (and one with more than a nod to my Aberdonian roots): was the 1ȼ a word that Pohl paid you more than you would have got from New Worlds?

A.15 Your point about Moorcock’s catholic taste is well made. Yes, If at 1ȼ a word paid roughly 50% more than New Worlds would have, albeit for 1^st World Serial Rights rather than 1^st British.
(Brief answer, huge effort! Searching the debris of half-a-dozen house moves, discovering ancient paperwork To Be Sorted Real Soon Now, researching the exchange rate, failing to find bank charges, then the calculations! Just so that I could say “50%”. Incidentally, as one born in Cardigan I must point out that you Aberdonians are heedless spendthrifts compared to the average Cardi.)

Q.16 Thanks for the effort in answering that last one. Second follow-up question: by the time that the issue of If with Sunbeam Caress dropped through your letter box (with four lovely Virgil Finlay illustrations) did you appreciate the stellar start you had made in the field? In the space of just over two years you had made double sales to each of the, arguably, top three editors in the field at the time (Moorcock, Ferman and Pohl), had cracked the American market (something that many of your contemporaries never attempted and/or managed), and found yourself sharing the pages of F&SF and If with the likes of Algis Budrys, J. G Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Philip José Farmer, Anne McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny, etc. That’s an impressive beginning.

A.16 Oh yes, that start certainly impresses me now. It’s strange to see “Redd” on covers alongside real writers like Budrys and Delany. But, did I appreciate that “stellar start” at the time? Not nearly enough, because it came piecemeal. By December 1966 I was back home holding down a job and studying seriously for civil engineering qualifications—a career, a life—so those efforts had to take precedence over writing. Throughout 1967-68 my story attempts often misfired; although the print appearances of my 1966 backlog may have looked good to others, to me I seemed to be going nowhere.

Q.17 Your answer leads me neatly into my next observation: after publication of The Frozen Summer (the first of your ‘Senechi’ stories, which appeared in If, March 1969) you only made eight appearances in print until the early eighties, and then there was a gap of six years before you started publishing regularly again in 1989. Was this all attributable to your career, or was it marriage, kids, etc.? Can you also elaborate a little more on your ’67-’68 “misfires”?

A.17 All those gaps up to 1989? Basically, career and family took up a lot of time. (For example, I gained my degree in 1973, but the long haul of becoming a Chartered Engineer ground on for another ten years.) That said, the “misfires” of 1967-68 did set a pattern.
Dismayingly, my first 1967 story (Nancy, written in February) went unsold until December 1968, and worse still, between those dates I also wrote another half-dozen stories, all but one rejected. Only The Frozen Summer sold. Even that single success was undercut for me by some embarrassingly awkward prose. When the 1966 A Quiet Kind of Madness saw print in May 1968, it seemed a story I’d got right almost by accident.
(For an example of getting it right by intent, see Tove Jansson’s 1971 story The Squirrel.)⁴
In December 1968, briefly buoyed by the sale of Nancy I suppose, I drafted Morning, but it didn’t go too well and was soon laid aside. Another misfire. 1969-70 saw me attempt three novels, all “completed”, all failures. Used up any goodwill at Ace, Doubleday, etc., with those. (My lifelong tendency to lapses of memory and judgement clearly infected the novel mss.) In 1971 I tried one last short story, Warship, which a year later was bought for Amazing by Ted White, bless him. I promptly revised Morning, and gained useful critiques of it at the 1972 Milford SF Writers’ Conference (thank you John Brunner and others), but that too didn’t sell for years until belatedly it was submitted to F&SF. The rest of the Seventies saw further attempts at short stories and novels, several involving Charles Platt and several others involving Peter Weston, but almost nothing reached print.
Then came the late Eighties. I became involved with road improvements in my home town—no commuting to work, no lodgings away!—and now that you mention it I notice this seems to have helped. Of twelve stories written 1989-91, ten actually sold, until work took me further afield and my writing declined again.

Q.18 That sounds like a long and gloomy period, writing wise anyway, but you’ve left out a couple of rays of sunshine: two of stories I read by you during that period were The Mammoth Hunters (New Worlds #5, edited by Michael Moorcock and Charles Platt, 1973, and presumably bought by the latter given your comments above), a time-safari story with an unsettling penultimate line; and (from what I’ve read so far) your best story, Brother Ape (Andromeda #3, edited by Peter Weston, 1978). From the introduction to that piece it seems clear that Peter Weston thought the same of this story of an alien (Senechi) dominated post-collapse Earth (with recovered human hi-tech weapons and smart chimpanzees!). So not all bad.
Other parts of your answer again touch on topics I wanted to ask you about (I’m beginning to wonder if you are half-writer/half pre-cog! Maybe I should stop asking questions and you should just send me your answers!) The first of these was why we had never seen any novels from you—well, now I know. What happened to those rejected novels? What were they about (I’m guessing one of them was a time-travel novel)?

A.18 No pre-cog here—it’s just you. You have a knack for asking several questions in one. I simply try to answer everything.
Can’t remember who bought The Mammoth Hunters, Mike probably. On a couple of later borderline submissions Charles gave a first “maybe” followed by Hilary (Bailey) saying yes or no, e.g. On the Deck of the Flying Bomb which would have appeared in New Worlds Quarterly had the sequence continued.
Odd that you thought Brother Ape my best up to then. I can’t see it. You seem surprised I didn’t consider it a rare “ray of sunshine” amid gloom. In fact I thought it no more than “business as usual” as did others, and no USA editor liked it. However, in about 2016 when Nancy Fulda’s AnthologyBuilder was still offering custom PoD anthologies of short stories provided by various co-operating authors, one customer chose a book entirely of my work, the title story being Brother Ape. “Go figure…”
Now from your implied questions to the ones with actual question marks attached. My pre-cog doppelganger has already answered the first. The second: what happened to the rejected novels? Largely destroyed, although titles survive. Lacklustre stuff. What were they about? The Time Disease was probably time-travel (good call). The Cold Millennium was a Senechi story set between The Frozen Summer and Brother Ape, never sent anywhere. Others were more routine. Did these little piggies go to market? Usually; most had at least a few outings. King of the Coal Swamps, which did not live up to its title, was certainly bounced by almost every publisher in America. Dark Sun was another not tried anywhere, despite which I recall it less unfondly than others—dystopian citizens are recruited, trained and flung at some interstellar puzzle, in a society which lets neither the citizens nor the readers perceive their physical circumstances clearly. (According to some incredulous readers of a sample, I had invented the information-free narrative.)
How many other novels did I write in the Seventies? Checking my old index cards—fallible, but now useful at last—I seem to have drafted four novels to 1970 and three more in the next decade, plus about four openings which usually died about page 93. This includes attempts at non-sf: a novelisation of student life (deliberately first-draft, hoping for spontaneity) was bounced very quickly by New English Library. Since then I’ve had occasional goes again, but produced no page-turners. Or sales. Everything seemed horribly rambling and dated.

Q.19 It always makes me uncomfortable to read of writers who either never submit their novels to publishers or (understandably enough) give up after a few submission attempts (a feeling that is exacerbated when you read of writers who have had eventually popular work rejected multiple times, e.g. J. K. Rowling’s dozen initial rejections, Charles Harness’s The Rose, etc.). It’s a pity you didn’t have a relentless agent working on your behalf at the time.
Your comment about Brother Ape being rejected by all the US magazine editors doesn’t, I would suggest, really tell us that much: there were only a handful of them at the time, and no obvious market for it like If (defunct at the end of 1974) or George Scither’s Asimov’s SF (which didn’t launch till 1977). Your opinion of the story leads me to a question that I was going to ask later but might as well spit out now: which of your stories are your favourites (if this is like asking someone to choose between their children then say which ones were the best received—or both if you like)?

A.19 Actually I did have a relentless agent working on my behalf for a while: the legendary Scott Meredith. If anyone could have sold me to publishers, he’d have done it. (e.g., Scott “really went to bat” with Ace over King of the Coal Swamps, I heard later.) The factor killing my interest on so many novel attempts was seeing a few good ideas swamped by a mass of ordinary words. And, increasingly, making the same mistakes every time.
Unlike some of my short stories. I hope.
Favourites? If any story is a favourite of mine it’s The Wounded Dragon, only a quirky Welsh fantasy but the words did bring in everything I asked of them. It’s also my only story first published by being read aloud at a convention rather than being printed. (I don’t do readings.) Another story which I would like to see survive is Morning, more Scandinavian angst which in my head I imagine hidden in a secret gap between other stories.
But I’ve no idea how these or most of my stories were received—never saw much feedback. No award winners or Dozois “Best of” for sure. Occasional reprints told me that some editors found some things acceptable.
Maybe I should say that my absolute favourite story is one I never managed to write properly despite many attempts: Lost Planet, in which Nancy discovers Dender’s time-colony marooned in the Palaeocene, and can’t rescue them. To which Eternity-Magic in your very own wonderful Spectrum SF was a sequel.

Q.20 My second follow-up about your ‘middle’ period is about Milford writers’ workshop. You went to the first one that was held in the UK in 1972 (and there is a short account from you on their website⁵): how did you get involved in that? You later attended several more over the next two decades: can you give us some of the highlights?

A.20 Judy Blish dug up addresses and wrote to folk, including me. (She was short of candidates.) Highlights? Meeting so many good people, e.g. Richard Cowper, Pam Boal, Rob Holdstock (to name some of the sadly missed) through to the 21st century and, oh, Vaughan Stanger, Ian Creasey, Colin P. Davies among too many to mention. (If you’re a Milford person reading this and thinking your name should be there, yes it should.) Lowlights also came: those lapses of judgement which dog my life, of course, but worse still, the shock of attendee Paul Tabori being suddenly rushed to hospital and dying weeks later—to my shame I’d known of him better for The Green Rain than for The Art of Folly and the rest. One last highlight? I was at a Milford wrap party when Chip Delany met (Lady) Naomi Mitchison; what a nice meeting of different cultures. Then I drove home.

Q.21 James Blish was on the list of attendees for that first conference and a couple of the later ones (he later died from lung cancer in 1975). It always struck me as odd that this Futurian, the author of the ‘Cities in Flight’ series (which I read in my teens) and other classics like A Case of Conscience, would wash up in the UK and spend his last few years in Oxfordshire. Did you have much to do with him during those first Milfords? What were your impressions of the man?

A.21 Blish as a literary man must have been under the spell of Oxford; he had really wanted to be there, or so I gathered from others.
Early Milford conferences were dominated by the frantic rush to read manuscripts – no emailed pre-circulation then – which left us only limited time for socialising. We managed some. By 1974 JB was obviously frail and concentrating with a fixed determination, but back in 1972 he was still relaxed enough to chat non-adversarially about, for example, the Star Trek novelisations coming from the author of A Case of Conscience. They weren’t incompatible with his fearsome literary integrity, I learned over breakfast. He told me they were useful “bridge material” (his phrase) enticing newcomers into other sf. (He was to prove quite correct in this, even in Wales.)
I hope Blish wouldn’t mind me saying that in story critiques he was a ruthless perfectionist (as he was of his own serious work, which I suspect could get over-revised) and I suffered this when he dismissed my story Morning as, if I may precis, derivative and inadequate. Nothing personal, he took pains to assure me afterwards. “At least So-and-so liked it,” I muttered. “So-and-so has a tin ear!” said Blish, reverting to workshop mode for an instant. Then he was human again.
(I should point out that some of the Biggest Names there such as Blish and Brunner were surprisingly considerate to their juniors. Ditto Brian Aldiss, exiting early in some vexation, yet pausing to apologise to me for leaving without commenting on my story. A lot of people took the Milford ethic of mutual help very seriously.)
Incidentally, I see that Robert Silverberg, writing in Asimov’s SF (Mar/Apr 2018) on the almost-forgotten sf writer Fletcher Pratt, in passing referred to James Blish as “a writer now pretty much forgotten himself…”  I find that sad. Blish did some wonderful things.

Q.22 Morning has a Count de Luna invite people to a party at his castle where a stasis field starts rising up from the ground floor and freezes the attendees in time. At a later point in this psychodrama The Wandering Jew turns up. I’m not quite sure what this is supposed to be derivative of.
Anyway, back at Milford you’ve mentioned a writer who is at the other end of the SFnal spectrum from Blish, Naomi Mitchison (or Baroness Mitchison, CBE, as she never called herself). My generation may recognise this (mostly) mainstream writer’s name⁶ but I didn’t know she had gone to Milford. What year was that? Impressions?

A.22 Starting with Morning: I think the Blish verdict was lukewarm The Masque of the Red Death. (Had he called it weak tea The Garden of Time I might have agreed. Might.) Probably his main complaints were stock ingredients and stock phrasing, although I can’t recall specific details.
Now, the amazing Naomi Mitchison: what a life, yet the internet this decade can say “Today, she has largely been forgotten”. Another one. She never attended a Milford workshop (that I know of) but was a Saturday-evening guest in 1974. Delany was quick to smile and mention Memoirs of a Spacewoman; Mitchison had the air of one enjoying herself greatly. They should have found much to discuss.
Those Milford end-of-week parties quickly became a tradition. In 1978 our guests included Nick Webb of Pan Books, a huge and genial man, confiding hopes that an untried author he’d commissioned to novelise a radio series could deliver. The author’s name was Douglas Adams. (His book—you’ll know the title—came out almost exactly a year after that party, and in a couple of months sold 200,000 copies. Nick must have been delighted. And relieved.)

Q.23 You’ve previously mentioned that when you were working from home in the late eighties it was a productive and fruitful period for your writing. What may be the first of that crop of stories (and the first of a short series) is your eco-dystopia story, Green and Pleasant Land (Interzone #32, November-December 1989): this is about a “green” military unit rescuing a family from a town that is about to be liquidated. The political setup in this future ecological or “Green” England is a cross between Stalin’s Russia and Cambodia’s Year Zero. Can you tell us about the series, and how you came up with the idea of turning this utopian ideal of a Green England on its head?

A.23 The first fruit of my 1989-91 renaissance was A Journey Along the Sprout Vector, itself sui generis and liberating, followed by new looks at old ideas. A couple of decades earlier I’d considered the problem of trade with a society considering man as an animal to be exploited. Naturally American capitalism entered the mix. So did the example of L. Ron Hubbard doing for religion what Hitler had done for public health (approximately). Logic suggested that a strictly Green land might not be a Pleasant land. I tried all sorts of ways into this, especially during 1989+, and all in all I sent out at least seven stories, of which the third suddenly sold very quickly. (Some others reached print later, one of them thanks to the editor of Spectrum SF.)
Thinking back to Green and Pleasant Land in Interzone, I made a lucky guess in taking my cue on English behaviour from The Sweeney. I could have considered The Code of the Woosters as a model instead; with only slight twists Wodehouse’s England could become very dark indeed. My Greenshirt extrapolation now seems dispiritingly close to how ISIS began with an impressive ten-point plan for an Islamic Utopia (less impressive if you were a woman) but soon devolved into the usual killing, raping and stealing. I think I got the self-righteous part of my characters right. Expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed, eh? The series wasn’t planned as a coherent sequence, more as a set of different bites at a very large cherry. Had I managed to say everything properly in a single story, as I nearly did in Green England, I might have stopped at just the one.

Q.24 Another story series, which I touched on briefly in my comments about Brother Ape, is your ‘Senechi’ sequence. This comprises three published stories (The Frozen Summer, Brother Ape and Moon Pearls), an unpublished novelette called Solus (which I had planned to run in Spectrum SF before it folded), and the early abortive novel you mentioned before. Although this sequence starts off with an alien dominated post-collapse Earth, the time frame telescopes throughout the series, and the background seems to change markedly each time (characters die in the interim, ‘Ravagers’ break the Senechi’s hold over the Earth, Senechi become beings of pure energy, etc.). What drew you back repeatedly to this series, and can you tell us a little more about it—did you plan any more stories, for instance?

A.24 Ah, you have put your finger on the Future History That Got Away. Yes, changes happen over an extended timescale. Along the way I got interested in questions of external and internal identity—alien outside, human in; human outside, alien in; what is human anyway; etc. It’s still a sequence closer to Thrilling Wonder Stories than to say Accelerando, but it’s mine.
Did I plan more stories? Of course. The Frozen Summer as published should be the third in the sequence. In the first Blanchard builds an airship, in the second Ven Gonnel starts and quits his expedition, in the third a remnant crew reach a valley of eternal summer. There would have been sequels (including Brother Ape) in which lost human tech is rediscovered including gene remodelling, and I planned an interlude in which one Senechi returns to the valley for its “Pool of Immortality”. As important as the future of humanity is the history of Ven Gonnel, the Senechi turned human sympathiser turned ghost. My final story, unwritten, would have featured a really nasty alien threatening Senechi and humans alike; my surviving cast retreat to the summer valley for a last stand (and a last blend of science and fantasy). All these notions caused me even more trouble than usual in the writing. I spent too much time on rewriting the stories I did start, not enough time on the rest. That’s why only three saw print.

Q.25 Another noteworthy story from this middle period is When Jesus Came to the Moon for Christmas (F&SF, January 1991). Not only did this fifth sale to Ed Ferman result in your contributions to F&SF appearing over almost his entire period as editor (your first sale to him, Sundown, appeared at the end of the second year of his ‘official’ editorship) but it is also a Christmas story that has at its core the tenets of Christian belief (most Christmas stories are more concerned with Santa Claus and other such stuff—this comment off the top of my head and with no further research).
I’ve noticed evidence of your church connections in past correspondence, so I am assuming that your faith is a major part of your life.

A.25 It’s interesting to reconcile belief in a Supreme Being with belief in the scientific method. The Book of Genesis begins with a formless void, matter taking shape, other life preparing a world which humans can inhabit. Not a bad account for illiterate nomads. The rest is less clear. Some early scrolls contain alternate takes on events rather than a single authoritative account, while a few original scrolls were clearly lost; conversely, various episodes in Christ’s ministry seem unflattering enough to look like history not hagiography; and so on. The Ten Commandments might owe something to Egyptian traditions, although whether Jewish captives influenced a monotheistic Pharaoh or vice versa seems lost in dating problems. Other details can surprise me, e.g. plotting ages against generation numbers for Adam’s descendants gives a peculiar stepped graph which defies explanation. All in all you assume correctly: When Jesus Came to the Moon for Christmas did reflect my interests and try to make serious points within its humour.

Q.26 Was this the only story that manifested your beliefs, or were there other efforts? Did you ever attempt your own The Quest for St Aquin, A Case of Conscience, A Canticle for Leibowitz?

A.26 Ed Ferman (“The Kindly Editor”) was always good to me, even when occasionally declining a submission. Following When Jesus Came to the Moon for Christmas I proposed another Sarah Brody story and he expressed interest. (It would have been a dark opposite, in which Sarah goes back to the time of Jesus and has to assume the role of Judas because no-one else will.) But Ferman stepped down, and the story remains unwritten. And after his day at F&SF, all successors to The Kindly Editor turned down everything I sent. (A later story still, my unfinished The Fireship, which you’ll remember was intended for your own editorial desk but again did not survive a stepping down, would have dealt with matters of faith.)

Q.27 If the Ice Mother is willing it still will.
Although later F&SF editors didn’t buy anything from you there were two stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction in ’93 and ’95, which must make you one of a tiny group of writers who have sold to Moorcock, Pohl, Ferman, Pringle, and Dozois (the only other one I can think of who might have done this is John Brunner). I had very little to do with Gardner (mostly just supplying magazine issues for his ‘Best of the Year’ perusal) but he seemed a thoroughly good egg. Did you have much to do with him, or were your two sales fairly straightforward transactions?

A.27 Gardner was indeed another Good Guy in my experience, although I too had little to do with him. I think he saw us both as “battered survivors of the New Wave”; kind of him to include me. Very little interaction, other than his notion of revisiting Wales some time and his unfailing courtesy both in acceptances and in rejections. One of the greats as writer, editor and person.

Q.28  Your two other main editors in this later period were David Pringle at Interzone and Elizabeth Counihan at Scheherazade. Generally, your shorter stuff seems to have gone to them or other markets, and the novelette length material to the States—in fact, this latter observation generally holds true for all of your output. Were you aware of this? Did you have better or worse luck with longer stories during the submission process?

A.28 Naturally I hadn’t noticed the long/short dichotomy you have spotted. There was no conscious separation of lengths for UK/USA markets, except that some magazines such as Scheherazade had little room for longer work. Early in my career I wrote mainly long stories; later on my ideas seemed to sprawl less, hence the shorter work.

Q.29 Returning to the topic of writing based your own life, I recently asked you in an email if there were any questions that you had expected me to ask but I hadn’t so far, and you replied, “You haven’t asked why no civil engineering science fiction has emerged from me. I’m rather glad.”
Now that I think about it I’m surprised that you haven’t produced something like a story about a civil engineer building a super highway on Mars, and who is having a particularly bad day (problems with the clients, the contractors, a failed software update on the road bots, extended supply lines to, and delayed communications with, Earth, etc.—I am sure you have many more ideas along this line from your long career). At the end of the day, however, he goes back to his pod and has a beer as night falls: as he watches the spectacular Martian sunset through his window the light fades away and so do his troubles. One for the future maybe?

A.29 Nice gentle idea. You should write it. Except that the Resident Engineer’s problems don’t fade away at sunset, believe me. Or believe the Book of Nehemiah, a project supervisor’s completion report which demonstrates that there’s more to building than just building.
Some of my fiction does include autobiographical elements, such as On the Deck of the Flying Bomb of course, and Coptic Street Sunset which has visible non-facts but a lot of absolute truth too. Civil engineering though, no, na, nein, je ne crois pas. (a) I lack the hard-science background needed for exoplanet construction tech. (b) An engineer’s bad day—i.e. a normal project day—is described so effectively within Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free that I wouldn’t compete. There are other stories I’d prefer to write should the magic return, as I think you know.

Q.30 Your comment about “the magic returning” leads me to my next set of questions, which we have partially discussed by email before. What do you think is wrong with your recent output? Is there a reason for this? Do you see matters improving?

A.30 No improvement in sight. My output is slow, intermittent, lacklustre as even I can see, and polishing doesn’t help. A decade-plus of rejection by previous markets hasn’t been encouraging. I’ve had fallow periods before, but nothing this bad. Visiting Blarney castle in 2004 I must have kissed the wrong stone. As you can see from these answers, stylistically I’m all over the place. The magic ribbon which pulls another world into being before your eyes no longer unreels consistently, and a few glimpses as the grey blur goes by don’t make a story. Only “a page of words”, as Christopher Priest once put it.

Q.31 I don’t think it helps that you seem to have an overly gloomy view about the quality of your own work. Anyway—if you are no longer writing, how are you passing the time in your retirement (I know you are doing a better job than me at keeping up with the SF magazines)?

A.31 I may be no longer writing productively, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried. The magazines—no, you’re the one keeping up, and I’m down to the essential minimum of F&SF and Interzone, plus a few fanzines (print of course). Otherwise there’s the usual domestic life. Before this question arrived on Monday I’d fed the birds and watered the tomatoes; downsized some donations to charity shops for friends and myself; visited my sister-in-law and walked her dog; done a little church correspondence/banking; given my eyes the drops-and-rest routine, and so on. (I’ve known worse days in the last decade.)
During my years as full church treasurer, I in effect project-managed the design, funding and construction phases of our church tower repairs. Not much writing then, except for a church-guide booklet in aid of funds. Over the last year I did finally put my father’s 1944-45 wartime diary onto Amazon CreateSpace (A Backroom Boy in World War II—advertisement).
Probably I should be doing something more socially responsible, but lately I’ve spent too much time with eyes closed listening to audiobooks: mostly reminiscences or Golden Age thrillers by such as Margery Allingham, although I did hear The Midwich Cuckoos recently (and what an unperceptive narrator our Mr Wyndham chose to give us!⁷) For further diversion, I’ve pencilled in 2020 to re-examine the output of children’s illustrator/topographical artist Ruth Cobb, possibly. We’ll see.
To sum up: just spending my time quietly with family. Today (Wednesday), answering questions for Paul Fraser in little bursts, and this evening an increasingly rare couple of hours with the Haverfordwest Cricket Club ‘B’ pub quiz team. And my son, down here from Cardiff scouting film locations, tells me of the upcoming New Welsh Writing Awards 2019, so I’ve just printed out their Call for Entries. Never say never again?

Q.32 As a spectacularly underperforming retiree myself that seems like a very busy life. You’ve also mentioned to me that a collection of your work is due out shortly. Are there any details you can share?

A.32 Greg Pickersgill is preparing a collection of 30 stories—the bulk of my output—for publication on Lulu. (You’ll recall that he and David Langford did a really excellent job of Lulu-publishing the Algis Budrys Benchmarks Continued reviews/essays trilogy.) Plans are that the book will be available in early December (2018). Its cover will include a landscape image for Sunbeam Caress painted by my late mother, a detail which pleases me very greatly. Greg has given me this email address—reddbook@gostak.cymru—and there is also a webpage. [This is a direct link to the book on Lulu.]

Q.33 I hope it is a success. Thanks very much for your time, David.

 

Poppy the cat visiting the Writer in Residence. . . .  ●

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1. My review of New Worlds #142 is here.

2. Marino Marini Quartet’s Mustafa is on YouTube.

3. The final Virgil Finlay illustration for Sunbeam Caress:

And there was one Finlay illustration for The Frozen Summer (If, March 1969):

4. Tove Jansson’s 1971 story The Squirrel is available in her collections The Listener and A Winter Book.

5. The 1972 Milford page is here.

6. Mitchison would have been known to mid to later seventies readers as Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison selected her classic SF novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman for the ‘SF Masterworks’ series (which I bought but have still not read—one day. . . .) and she also contributed stories to a number of genre anthologies of the time (Harry Harrison’s Nova series, Peter Weston’s Andromeda, etc.).

7. David added this footnote about The Midwich Cuckoos: “The viewpoint character is so nondescript I’ve forgotten his name already. Towards the end his brain seems totally uninvolved. Did Zellaby’s mentoring help shape the Children to his own extreme views? Did the U.S.S.R. have to destroy its town of cuckoos because the regime had taught them to act like Soviets? Was the destroy-reflex of tribal societies more effective than the British “civilised” response? When a primitive culture faces a superior enemy, is a suicide bombing the right and proper tactic? When in the book a lesbian pleads for the children, is it the sympathy of one minority group for another—or a case of the Children’s mental influence? What do the Children perceive in the long-absent narrator that identifies him as a villager? He doesn’t even notice that these questions exist! Notice how a nominally much better candidate for observing the Children, soldier Alan, is shunted off-stage very quickly. I deduce that Wyndham was building on lessons learned during writing The Kraken Wakes, and deliberately gave his narrator an extreme stiff-upper-lip incuriosity, probably as sugar-coating for unpalatable ideas.” ●