Fantastic Metropolis

Some time later, when I was out of the RAF, a large young man in flannel trousers turned up—you. I can remember our second meeting, but only very vaguely the first. I do remember that we became friends practically immediately. I was impressed by that Moorcockian determination: a professional writer and editor since leaving school at fifteen! You said (inaccurately) that you were purely commercial. It was a good attitude to take at the time.

Like everyone else I assumed you to be older than you were. I recall asking you, one day, how you had avoided National Military Service (which was in force at the time). I got no distinct answer beyond a sense of puzzlement. That was because you weren’t old enough for National Service yet!

Pete Taylor was a longstanding friend of yours and I became friends with him through you, though of course he also was a Globe attendee. I remember him saying to me once, ‘Never get rid of your collection, man. I got rid of my collection, and I could cry over it.’ I know now exactly how he felt.

The atmosphere in that dingy little bar, every Thursday night, was wonderful, a regular mixture of fans and professionals, so that you got to know almost everybody in London who took sf seriously. People would turn up there from all over the world. It’s something I’m very glad to have experienced, and since sf was not as generally accepted then as it is now, it’s probably something which will never be repeated.

Michael Moorcock: Your memory of all this is clearer than mine. I remember how stimulated I was by your intellectual ideas. I had never met anyone before who thought naturally like a philosopher! And who understood advanced scientific ideas so thoroughly. I am pretty sure that if I began as ‘commercial’, any early ambitions I got to do something else were a good deal inspired by you. We lived and worked together after I came back from Sweden. We tried to collaborate on a novella for Carnell called Duel Among The Wine Green Suns. Parts of this found their way into The Sundered Worlds and parts into The Final Programme. You, of course, invented DUEL, the mighty computer, for ‘Duel Among the Wine Green Suns,’ which I lifted whole for FP. But you also turned me on to the possibilities of computers and we used to discuss those huge cryogenic giants with awe, never quite realising we’d actually have a version in our own homes one day. Most of our collaborations, in fact, were exactly what I said—commercial. We did a lot of work together for the Fleetway Magazines. We did science, historical and natural history articles for Look and Learn and I wrote ‘The Life of Constantine the Great’ for Bible Story Weekly. I had the practical instincts, I suppose, of a working journalist. I expected to make a living from my writing. It was my job. Our first sale to New Worlds was a collaboration, too—was it ‘Going Home’?—and didn’t we also collaborate on a story published under Hilary Bailey’s name? Carnell had a prejudice against your work, so I suggested you use a pseudonym. You used the name of a friend. As I recall Carnell started buying your stories at once and sent the money to the friend. Not all that money came to you in the end! And when, as a kind of proof of his prejudice, I revealed to Carnell that this was really Barrington Bayley his response was ‘well I still don’t like Bayley’s work.’ So you were stuck with your dodgy friend. We lived together for a bit—or if you prefer, I squatted on your floor. We used to go to The Swan in Knightsbridge, near the offices of Chemistry and Industry, where Ballard worked, and meet once or twice a week to discuss how awful sf was, how awful modern fiction was, and what we could do with it. Do you remember persuading Carnell to run The Terminal Beach? The excitement with which we first read The Drowned World? Do you remember when you first met Ballard?

Barrington J. Bayley: Yes, I can see that we complemented each a great deal. I benefited rather more than you did, I think.

And yes, those gigantic computers! Something sf writers didn’t foresee was that electronics was going to become microscopic (well, someone did - there was a one-off story in New Worlds). Electronic machines were envisaged as getting huger and huger. I had a fight between a mobile building-sized ‘electronic brain’ and an equally big biological monster in one of my boys’ serials. Still, we bucked the trend in ‘Duel Among the Wine-Green Suns’. It had a cabinet-sized computer which could do world-scale simulation. We got around the size problem with ‘electron resonance plates’ (silicon chips hadn’t been invented yet.) They sound good, a bit like the quantum computers people talk about nowadays.