The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

In British s-f nowadays, all roads lead eventually to Mike Moorcock’s Ladbroke Grove flat-and-office, where a hot argument on the virtues of the Ontological Approach or a stiff debate on the Metaphysics of Time may—at any hour of the day or night—compete with (what I am assured is) a connoisseur’s collection of rock ‘n’ roll (full-volume, of course), or with Moorcock’s own excellent blues guitar— while one of the young literary protégés of the household pecks out the end to a rent-payer story on the typewriter in the living room, and three-year-old Sophie struggles to open the concealed Victorian lock of the latest strongbox or escritoire Daddy has brought home from a walk down the Portobello Road.

You understand, I am exaggerating—but not much.

And perhaps you understand, too, how interest and enthusiasm on the part of (particularly new, but also established) authors spreads and multiplies around such a focal point. The results do not all show up in New Worlds (or in Impulse): far from it. The stories that germinate in sessions like these, or on the trip home, are as likely to turn up in the higher-paying American magazines, or in the flourishing British paperback book market.

Among the younger writers most often found in the center of the Moorcock ferment are Charles Platt (“Lone Zone” in New Worlds, No. 152) B. J. Bayley (“All the King’s Men,” No. 148), Langdon Jones (“The Leveller,” No. 152, and “The Empathy Machine,” Science Fantasy), Hilary Bailey and Thorn Keyes, who both produced exciting “firsts” in 1964, and Johnny Byrne—

Born, Dublin, 1937. Convent and Jesuit educated. Came to England, 1957. Studied some more and then went on the road, sleeping under bridges, picking apples in Kent and pears in Somerset.

Jobs include art gallery manager, barman, electrician’s mate, Christmas tree feller in the lake district, lifesaver on the Isis in Oxford, dullage sorter on Liverpool docks, editor of three small circulation magazines, door to door vac salesman, seller of devotional articles—monstrances, chasubles, altar breads, prie dieux, etc., to the English Catholic public. A spell in Paris teaching English to foreigners and finally the same kind of teaching here in London.

“Yesterdays’ Gardens” was commissioned for a French children’s magazine. ... By the time I got round to writing and translating it, it was no longer needed. It is dedicated to the son of Anselm Hollo, the Finnish poet who lives and works in England.