I decided that I could pass myself off as a sociologist of literature, and set out to write a thesis on the Sociology of Science Fiction. Some chapters of this project were submitted for the B.Phil. before I re-registered for a doctorate, while the fairly prolific spinoff from my explorations ended up in such diverse places as Foundation, Vector, and Amazing.
* * * *
By the end of 1972 my career (and, indeed, my life) seemed to have turned completely around. I got married in September 1973, by which time I had completed three of the five projected sequels to Halcyon Drift, and had managed to sell half a dozen short stories. I was also half way through a submission draft of Man in a Cage.
In the course of a rather makeshift honeymoon in London my agent and I hustled through a program of meetings with publishers which was—on the surface, at least—highly productive. J. M. Dent had bought British rights to my six-book series; Quartet, having failed to buy rights to the whole Dies Irae trilogy only because Ace had stupidly sold the first volume to a publisher of instant remainders, decided that they would commission a new trilogy; Anthony Cheetham, having recently set up Futura, asked me to write two non-fiction books for a projected line of popular B-format non-fiction titles; one was to be a history of science fiction, the other a layman’s guide to the wonders of modern science.
Flushed with this success, I finished the final draft of Man in a Cage in a fortnight and hammered out The Fenris Device (the fifth Grainger book) in a further three weeks. Then I set out upon a program of intensive reading for the book on the history of SF.
Between January 1974 and May 1975 I wrote the sixth and last Grainger novel, the trilogy—collectively entitled Realms of Tartarus—which I had sold to Quartet, and the two books commissioned by Anthony Cheetham: a 135,000 history of SF entitled Scientific Imagination in Literature, and a 100,000-word popularisation-of-science book called The Mysteries of Modern Science. I also wrote a short fantasy novel for children. I was, briefly, a full-time writer, utterly committed to the profession—but it all went sadly awry.
Quartet folded after issuing the first part of the trilogy (which sold disastrously, possibly because no copies were distributed outside the London area), and no US publisher could be found for it. Dent decided that science fiction was not their sort of thing after all and got out, leaving the Grainger series incomplete in hardcover and fouling up the timing of the Pan paperbacks. Anthony Cheetham shelved plans for his line of popular non-fiction books, ultimately rejecting Scientific Imagination in Literature and selling on The Mysteries of Modern Science (without consulting me) to Routledge & Kegan Paul. RKP eventually published it—Heaven alone knows why—as an academic book, in which dubious guise it sold very badly and was rightly condemned by its reviewers for shallowness and unoriginality. The juvenile fantasy failed to sell.
This chain of disasters was ameliorated somewhat by my agent’s success in selling translation rights to the Hooded Swan series and the Realms of Tartarus trilogy, and by the fact that DAW remained a safe market. I wrote a new novel for Don Wollheim, The Mind Riders, and submitted with it a proposal for a new six-book series, promising that this one would be rather more earnest than the last (whose subversions and perversions of pulp convention had ultimately begun to annoy him). Don gave me a contract for the first three books of the series, bailing me out of a situation which threatened to become financially desperate, given that I had lately acquired a new dependant in the shape of my son Leo.
While my unease was still acute, however, my wife spotted an ad in The Guardian; the University of Reading needed a temporary lecturer in the sociology of literature to replace a member of staff who was on sabbatical leave. I did not think I had any chance at all of getting the job, given that my first degree was in Biology, but I applied anyway. Fortunately, the head of the department, Stanislav Andreski, thought that a degree in Biology was worth more than a degree in Sociology, and was also of the entirely justifiable but daringly unconventional opinion that the only relevant qualification for teaching the sociology of literature was to be a published novelist. I got the job.
* * * *
I could not regard the Reading job as anything more than a stopgap but I did try to use it as a launching-pad. I applied for twenty-three other academic jobs during the course of my year there, but I failed to get a single interview (there are not many people in British higher education as calculatedly unorthodox as Professor Andreski was). Knowing that my escape from the uncertainties of full-time writing had only been postponed, I set myself a punishing writing schedule. In the course of the year I produced the second and third books in the new series for Don Wollheim, revised Scientific Imagination in Literature for resubmission to other publishers, and wrote a new juvenile fantasy novel.
The latter parts of this schedule were completed under awkward circumstances. In order to save some money so that we could buy a house while I still had a salary (and was thus able to get a mortgage) my wife and I moved in with her parents—who lived in Swansea. During the final term of my teaching contract I travelled to Reading on Tuesday mornings and returned to Swansea on Thursday evenings, lodging for two nights with Dave and Hazel Langford. This proved surprisingly exhausting, but I did save enough for a deposit on a house, where I hoped that I would be able to pursue my somewhat-delayed career as a professional writer in reasonable comfort.
In order to supply myself with work for 1977 I had obtained a second three-book contract from DAW to complete the Daedalus series (and Don had also been persuaded to take the ill-fated Realms of Tartarus, although he insisted on doing it in a single volume instead of three). More importantly, though, I was co-opted by Peter Nicholls—who had published a number of my academic articles while he was editor of Foundation—to work on an encyclopedia of science fiction which was being packaged by Roxby Press; in the course of a little over a year I produced 133,000 words for it, obtaining some benefit, at last, from all the work I had put into Scientific Imagination in Literature—which failed to sell even in its second incarnation.
Before 1977 ended, though, yet another freak of chance consented to divert the course of my life. The man who taught philosophy of social science in the Sociology Department at Reading decided to emigrate to Australia, and I was invited by the acting Head of Department (Professor Andreski was away on sabbatical at the time) to apply for the post. The opportunity was too good to pass up. I got the job, and a mere nine months after rejoining the profession of science fiction I abandoned it yet again. I was, however, on a three year contract which might or might not be converted into a tenured post and I was not prepared to take it for granted that my contract would be renewed. Because I was reluctant to take on the much bigger mortgage that moving to Reading would have required I decided to commute again, on the same three-day-week basis as before.
I continued writing, but the strains of commuting made it very difficult to write anything other than short pieces during term time. Because I was financially cushioned by my job I decided that I would abandon series hackwork and endeavor to write books of a slightly more ambitious nature.
After finishing the last of the Daedalus books I outlined one such project—The Walking Shadow—and sold it in the UK to Fontana, who had just bought UK rights to The Mind Riders. I had two other projects to complete before I began work on it. The first was my long-delayed doctoral thesis, which I was strongly advised to write up in order to strengthen my case for being given tenure. The second was to prove the most disastrous episode in a career which already seemed to me to have had more than its fair share of ups-and-downs.
* * * *
During my first year at Reading I had met the widow of the SF writer James Blish, about whom I had written a long article for Foundation’s special memorial issue. In the course of sorting out the Blish estate she ran into difficulties with Doubleday, who had commissioned Blish to write a history of witchcraft for them before he contracted the cancer which ultimately
killed him; now that he was dead, they wanted their money ($6,500) back. Judy—who was not at that time certain that the estate could find the money—suggested that she look for someone who might complete the book. Doubleday agreed, but refused to pay out any more until the manuscript was in their hands. Judy asked me if I would do the book for the remainder of the advance plus a fee to be paid by the estate. I agreed, even though Blish had only managed to complete about 10,000 words of first draft and I would have to produce the book more-or-less from scratch.
Having researched the book for a year I spent the first half of 1978 producing a manuscript of some 120,000 words. When it went to Doubleday they replied—without even bothering to read it—that there had been a change of policy and that the company was no longer doing non-fiction for the mass-market; they had written off the $6,500 and were not prepared to honor the remade contract. I already knew before this happened that the ethics of the publishing industry were somewhat suspect, as one would expect in a profession consisting entirely of entrepreneurial middlemen, but this has always seemed to me to be despicable behavior.
The failure of the witchcraft book was compounded by the failure of The Walking Shadow to sell in America. Insult was added to injury when Fontana decided that they would abandon their SF line; in order to break even they printed only 12,500 copies of the book (which sold out instantly), and declined to reprint it. This did not seem to matter, because I was then taken on by Pan, who gave me a two-book contract and made encouraging noises about buying Realms of Tartarus if I could get Quartet to revert the rights. Quartet eventually did so, but only after representations from my solicitor. Unfortunately, they had delayed long enough for Pan to get into the same state as Fontana, forced by economic recession to abandon their SF line. Pan published the first of the two books they had commissioned but the second disappeared into a black hole.
Don Wollheim took the two books which I wrote for Pan and gave me a three-book contract for the initial volumes of yet another six-part series, but I was sufficiently chastened to decide that the state of the publishing industry made it imperative for me to continue my teaching career. When I was given tenure I decided that instead of producing the usual action-adventure hackwork I would follow my own inclinations and write a more contemplative book. Don rejected it, and told me to rewrite it with much more zip. He was entirely right in his evaluation, but the rejection nevertheless threw me into a state of utter dejection.
I could not face the thought of producing another series to order, so I asked Don Wollheim if he would take three separate books instead. He agreed, and I rapidly dashed off Journey to the Centre and The Gates of Eden, both of them obvious pastiches of my earlier series. Half way through the third such exercise in self-parody, however, I felt that I had had enough, and I asked Don in mid-1981 either to take The Walking Shadow or to tear up the third contract; he chose the latter course.
For the first time since I had started writing, I no longer had Don Wollheim to fall back on. Any prospect of renewing the relationship vanished when Gates of Eden appeared with the last two lines missing. Assuming that they had been censored in order to make the end look more positive I wrote an intemperately sarcastic letter to Locus advising would-be readers of the change—which annoyed Don extremely, because in fact he had only contrived to lose the last page of the manuscript, and had not realized that anything was missing.
Feeling that I had been utterly defeated by circumstance, I gave up writing fiction altogether; I decided that I would concentrate instead on my academic writing and on popular non-fiction.
* * * *
The gradual acceptance of science fiction into the repertoire of American Academia ensured that a steady stream of reference books was produced in the late seventies and early eighties. The pay was poor, and became poorer as the population of academics eager to work for nothing steadily grew. Such work kept me fully occupied for several years, but the stream inevitably dried up. The library shelves filled up, sales of new projects dropped, and the money on offer became derisory. There was, however, further spinoff from the reference-book work.
Roxby Press, packagers of the Nicholls encyclopedia and The Science in Science Fiction (which Dave Langford and I were brought in to rescue when Peter Nicholls failed to meet his deadline), asked me to write a coffee-table book on the impact of biotechnology, which eventually appeared under the title Future Man; Shuckburgh-Reynolds, the packagers for whom I wrote most of the SF entries for Novels and Novelists—and who were later to package The Science Fiction Source-Book—asked me to write an imaginary history of the future. This eventually became The Third Millennium, with Dave Langford co-opted as collaborator to handle the hard-science parts of the extrapolation. In parallel with this work I painstakingly researched my academic magnum opus, a definitive study of the British tradition of speculative fiction. It was ultimately published as Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950.
Working for packagers, as I quickly discovered, is even worse than working for publishers, which is quite bad enough. Packagers tend to think of themselves as the true originators of their books, and of writers as mere hirelings delegated to supply the boring black-and-white bit which occupies the space between the pictures. A packager will labor long and hard over the production of a glossy package to show to publishers—which may then take two or three years actually to find a buyer—but will then demand the rest of the text in double-quick time, and will butcher it as he sees fit.
Future Man, as published, bears little resemblance to the text which I submitted. The Third Millennium was ruthlessly reduced by some twenty thousand words, mostly by virtue of the rigorous excision of all the explanations. Packagers only want the lurid bits and the funny bits; intelligence and argumentative scrupulousness are to them embarrassing excesses to be furtively discarded. They will tolerate facts in reference books, because they cannot think of any legitimate reason for excluding them, but their true ambition in most of what they produce is to reduce popular nonfiction to the standards of tabloid journalism, in the faint hope that they might thereby catch the attention of people who do not normally read books.
The frustrations of working for packagers were to some extent compensated by the freedom to write Scientific Romance in Britain exactly as I wanted it. When I delivered it I put in an outline for a new project which seemed to me to have more commercial potential—a book entitled Eroticism in Supernatural Literature, based on a long article on that topic which I had written for the Salem Press Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature. I had also begun researching an exercise in the sociology of popular culture, dealing with the explosion of British paperback book publishing during the post-war paper shortage, tentatively entitled The Vulgar Avant-Garde. I had completed the first three chapters of the book on supernatural literature when the publishers told me that they had been unable to fix up a deal with a US publisher to distribute it in America, and that it could not be commercially viable without such a deal. I abandoned the book in disgust.
This was undoubtedly a fortunate turn of events, although I did not realize it until the time came when I could contemplate the sales figures for Scientific Romance in Britain (157 copies in the UK, not counting the remainders). I realized that there is very little point in writing books of such an esoteric nature—it’s not so much that they don’t make any money, but that hardly anybody wants to read them. Leaving aside the tenure-and-promotion games which waste so much American paper, academic work in the humanities is essentially a form of vanity publishing. As the present volume and its many companions testify, however, it is a kind of vanity publishing to which I remain addicted.
There remain several large-scale academic projects which I would have liked to tackle had I continued my academic career. All the extant books on the philosophy of biology are desperately bad, and virtually all books on the general philosophy of science concentrate far too much on building models based on the underlying logic of physics (within whi
ch biology cannot easily be accommodated). Then again, all the extant books on the psychology and sociology of gambling are either ludicrous or consist of extremely superficial surface-scratching, and I would have liked to put a wide-ranging study of psychological probability into its proper context. No full-time professional writer could possibly consider wasting time on such projects, but in the unlikely event that I should ever become financially secure I would doubtless be tempted to look at them again.
* * * *
Various factors combined to bring my writing to a complete halt early in 1985, for the first time in twenty years. My first wife had left me eighteen months before, arguing that there was no point in being married to someone as introverted, unsociable, and generally incompetent as me, and our divorce was then lurching through its concluding phases. I was deep in debt because of the divorce, and it seemed for a while that I would have to sell either my house or my book collection—a fate from which I was only saved by a couple of fortunate sales of translation rights to old works.
Late in 1986—after a gap of more than five years—I decided to have another go at writing fiction. The British market seemed to be booming again after a long period of stagnation, but at first I was carefully determined to take a hobbyist approach and I set out to write a number of short stories based on ideas I had been storing away for some time. I was greatly encouraged when the first two which I sent out were accepted immediately, one of them in America. My next eleven submissions to American magazines were all unsuccessful, but Interzone proved to be more hospitable and other markets were opening up in Britain. Furthermore, David Pringle—one of the editors of Interzone, with whom I had been acquainted for many years—was being asked for advice by various publishers keen to begin or resuscitate science fiction lines; his assistance proved invaluable in obtaining new contracts.
Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Page 20