Master of Bioscience

Brian Stableford is one of Britain's longest serving and best loved science fiction authors. With degrees in biology and sociology, he is ideally placed to write novels that comment on the impact of biotechnology on society. Brian is also an expert on the history of scence fiction and fantasy literature and has translated many classic 19th Century French works. The following article about Brian was written by Dave Langford. It dates from 1987 but, as always with Dave, it is well worth reading.

My Secret Life With Brian Stableford

This is the trouble about living just down the road from a practically famous author: crazed convention organizers expect you to know all his most embarrassing inner secrets. I'm not actually sure whether Brian Stableford has any embarrassing secrets, since unlike like eighty or ninety SF hacks you and I could both mention, he seems devoid of naff pretensions about the awesome literary inwardness of his works. Autobiographical comments tend to be more along the lines of "Oh, that book only took a week or two to write, I was a bit young then and did it in the school holidays." Or: "My agent told me to write down the plots of the Odyssey and Iliad with SF names, and it would sell as a trilogy... it did too, people hitting each other with swords all over the galaxy." Or: "Of course my novels aren't all cynical and sarcastic. In one of them, if I remember correctly, the hero very nearly got the girl."

Brian as collaborator is actually a bit alarming: I've worked with him on a couple of non-fiction masterpieces and find he tends to dash off 30,000 words of polished final copy while I'm still staring at the blank expanse under the heading "Chapter One". Brian as critic can be utterly devastating ("This stroppy little man," expostulated a Mr Aldiss), but after wielding his awesome knowledge of unreadable 19th-century SF and carving a swathe through today's fantasy grot, he comes up with the occasional gem: one of his reviews helped bring Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare from small-press obscurity to its recent major hardback release. Brian the Bearded was the standard Stableford release for many a year, and this Albacon's posters were the first public acknowledgement of his major reissue as Brian the Clean-Shaven.

The de-bearding must have added to his charms: in May this year he married the lovely Jane. Then, while she stayed in Reading, Brian dashed off for a non-honeymoon at a futurological conference in Tokyo. Such is the hectic life of a writer/critic/biologist/futurologist/sociologist....

Brian the Public Speaker has also evolved before my stupefied gaze. A decade ago he nervously and mumblingly addressed the Reading group with what appeared to be bits of his SF Encyclopaedia articles. By the mid-eighties he'd obviously been practising on helpless guinea-pig audiences at Reading University lectures: I only ask you to believe that at Cymrucon (Cardiff) he held the convention spellbound with a hilarious forty-minute talk, impromptu, on SF as exemplified by the life and philosophy of Wittgenstein. I would say nice things about his later speech at one of the Beccons (Essex), but that was the time I got up too early for my single day's conventioneering, drove for countless exhausted miles, collapsed into the front row, and went to sleep. They told me later that Brian's comments on this snoring figure comprised a tour de force of non-repetitive abuse. Wish I'd, as it were, been there.

Brian the Radio Personality is one persona with which I've shared the odd microphone, trying to plug books like The Third Millennium. It usually went something like this....

INTERVIEWER: I really enjoyed this marvellous book the, um, Third Million. And one of the things I particularly wanted to ask you about was, er, [opens book at random] this picture, this very imaginative picture of, er, [squints at caption] a 27th century electronic sexual stimulation device?

BRIAN: I want to start by saying we had nothing to do with the pictures. Disregard the pictures. Other hands inserted them without our knowledge.

ME: And the captions too. Ask about anything but the pictures and captions. And tables. And maps.

BRIAN: And do remember that this is a book of speculation, not prediction. It's an imaginative history of the future.

ME: With a bit of wishful thinking about the gloomy bits.

BRIAN: Because you can't have an all-out World War III in 1995 or whenever if you want lots more interesting future history all the way from 2000 to 3000....

INTERVIEWER: Oh yes. So, on what grounds do you make this very daring prediction of [inserts hastily selected random sentence from book here], and do you really expect us to believe it will come true...?

[The authors groan, in stereo.]

The best part of these radio ventures was chatting in the pub afterwards about the number of active brain cells possessed by the interviewer, the millions of terrible review copies we'd recently read (Brian: "I didn't actually read XXXX, I only had to synopsize it for this reference book, not review it...."), and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.

And that brings us back to Brian the Skiffy Author, for whom I had a lot of fondness before ever meeting the man himself. Besides any books mentioned above (ahem), try to get hold of Man in a Cage (his most ambitious and hardest to find), The Walking Shadow (that was the one whose first Fontana printing sold out in an incredible seven weeks -- after which the publishers, piqued by the public's failure to buy at a more restrained rate, declined to reprint), the six "Hooded Swan" books (whose cynical, non-violent hero has a lot of the author in him) and the enjoyable "younger readers" fantasy The Last Days of the Edge of the World.

Meanwhile, this weekend is your chance to corner Brian in the bar and listen to the terrible, witty, cruelly dismissive things he says about most of his other books. Return him to Reading in good condition, please. Before long I'll be wanting to pick his brains about some other ghastly trilogy or even dekalogy that has to be reviewed....

Dave Langford

More about Brian

Bringing you up to date, Brian and Jane are still happily married and have not felt the need to flee from their proximity to the Langford abode. Brian is still clean shaven. Tor books are in the process of publishing a series of novels by Brian based on the future history described in The Third Millennium. The Hooded Swan novels are to be re-released in summer 2001 by Big Engine.

Cheryl Morgan

Renaissance Goth

Multi-talented people are usually Renaissance Men in media-speak (while Renaissance Women do not exist; instead there are Superwomen). Brian is not really a Renaissance Man. He couldn’t fresco the ceiling of a chapel to save his life, or improvise a sonnet in Tuscan dialect. Give him a lute, and he would smile politely and hand it back. If you were lucky. Mind you, like that first science-fiction artist Leonardo da Vinci, he has invented a few machines, that may or may not get built in the next five hundred years. And there is no doubt that he is multi-talented. He can play cricket; he can bet on race-horses and win, mostly; and he used to find poker quite profitable too. And he has all kinds of arcane expertise. If you ask him (and, sometimes, even if you don’t) he will tell you far more than
any sane person ought to want to know about Goth music, or about late nineteenth-century French decadents.

Don’t ask him about Goth music in his living room, or he will start putting CDs on. Exit the living room quickly, turn right past the corridor of pre-War fantasy and sf, L to R, turn left into the corridor of pre-War fantasy and sf, R to Z, and go into the dining room. There, on the left hand wall, soon to fill the left hand wall, is the monument to the main Stableford talents. Shelf upon shelf of books that he has written, or edited, or written for. There’s no need to list them; and no space either. The highlights can be found in the Encyclopedias of Science Fiction and Fantasy. His first professional sale was when he was 17, in 1965. He wrote novels while a biology student at York, and continued as a DPhil
student in the Biology Department and then (leaving all his flour beetles to die) as a DPhil student in Sociology. He became a sociologist at Reading University, until he realized he would have more fun (though not necessarily more money) as a full-time writer. Now he still does some university teaching (at King Alfred’s, Winchester), but he is more of a full-time writer than most full-time writers. I remember spending one New Year’s Eve with him as he moaned about failing to reach his target of a million published words that year.

He has been writing superb science fiction for thirty years now; some excellent fantasy; and some of the most interesting science fiction and fantasy criticism too (two monographs, several volumes of collected essays, endless encyclopedia contributions, countless reviews). With some writers, one might be recommending books they published twenty years ago, but Brian is writing better than ever. Try some of the short stories and novellas he has published in the last few years, mostly in Asimov’s or Interzone, at least one of which seems to end up in every Best of the Year collection from Gardner Dozois. Or read the excellent series that he has just finished, four books out so far, which started
with Inherit the Earth. It’s some of the best new British sf around, but it is not published in Britain, so no Arthur C. Clarke Award for him. When you meet him in Jersey, don’t ask him about Goths, ask him about the state of British sf publishing…

Edward James

To read an interview with Brian from the Strange Horizons web site click here.

To visit a fan-run web site devoted to Brian's work click here.