2024-2026: Speak, Memory

2024 started with an excellent broadcast on 29th January by Breakfast in the Ruins about The Time of the Hawklords. The podcast anchor, who's name I could not find on his site, gets what I was trying to say in this novel better than most.

The best edition to get hold of is the latest one from Apex-Verlag who did a new English-language edition in 2021, fully revised and with an author introduction. They also released a new edition of the book's sequel, Queens of Deliria, revised and with an introduction by Rick Evans. More details on the new editions and how to get hold of them, can be found here.

Any German readers please note that the German-language editions Apex-Verlag published alongside these are taken from the partly-revised Griffin Music/ Collector’s Guide Publishing editions of 1995, and are not fully revised and do not have introductions.

March saw Nazi Fucks Punk Off from Gareth Jackson’s NULL23 imprint. A collection of fiction and poetry edited by William Weiss it included a new printing of ‘Das Neue Leben’, nestled up against William’s weary sceptical unpicking of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic. Although ‘Leben’ was published comparatively recently (Emanations #1, 2011) I started writing the piece around mid-1983. It was to have become a novel, but instead it became the ‘push’ for David Britton to write Lord Horror, and I jumped from writing my book to helping him write his.

In August, I was honoured to write an introduction to Jean-Paul L Garnier’s new collection of speculative fiction, Cardboard Spaceship from Shacklebound Books (speculative in the true original New Wave sense!) and an appreciation for Oz Hardwick’s excellent ‘future-past’ prose-poems, Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed, from the charming Hedgehog Press. For this, I found myself unexpectedly published alongside a musical hero, Arthur Brown, who had also been asked to write something. Brown first appeared on mainstream British television in 1968 wearing a headdress of fire and was as rivetingly ersatz-shamanic to watch as Screaming Lord Sutch climbing into his coffin six years earlier! Seeing us both together on the same page was an unexpected pleasure.

Cover art by Shacklebound Books

In November a new revised edition of Joe Banks’ Sideways Through Time: An Oral History of Hawkwind in the 1970s, appeared from Strange Attractor Press. Sideways appeared initially as a limited-edition adjunct of the main book. Now it was being released to a wider market, with additions. The reprint contained the interview Joe conducted with me for his 2020 biography, Hawkwind: Days of the Underground, plus two pages taken from a previously unpublished section of The Time of the Hawklords.

In December, Corridor8, the journal I co-founded to look at contemporary visual art and writing in the North of England expanded its remit into the English Midlands. Also, that month, Wave IX, an ingenious one-off of tributes to the eponymous fictitious magazine in JG Ballard's 1961 short story ‘Studio 5, The Stars’, appeared from Space Cowboy Books. Edited and produced by Jean Paul L Garnier it included ‘Concentrate 1’, reprinted from New Worlds #174, August 1967, the product of a collaboration with Ballard, who wanted to show me the subbing technique used by William Burroughs’ to condense his work. As an example, Ballard edited ‘Concentrate 1’ from a longer piece of my work.

Also in December, ‘More Extracts from The Sunshine Island’, appeared in Emanations #11.

At the year's end I completed a first draft of The Sunshine Island, a memoir on which I had been at work for forty years. The Sunshine Island takes the form of a quest to find answers to the obsessions of my father, a founder-member of the Vegan Society who foisted his beliefs about diet and health onto his family, eventually breaking it up, and the part played in this by a Caribbean island. It was a traumatic, but atypical childhood, from which my science fictional beginnings arose.

The Sunshine Island and a new memoir, Driven by Anger, on which I am presently engaged, are without a publisher. For new readers and anyone else interested, editor Carter Kaplan has published extracts from these memoirs in six consecutive issues of his journal: Emanations: I am Not a Number (2017), Octo-Emanations (2020), Emanations: When a Planet Was a Planet (2021), Emanations Zen (2023), Emanations #11 (2024) and Emanations #12 (2026), all illustrated with period images.

Driven by Anger will unpick the life of my remarkable mother, one of the otherwise ordinary housewives of the time (the nineteen-fifties) who braved society’s opprobrium by leaving their high-handed husbands and becoming their own person. It will also recount my time at New Worlds and the early years of Savoy Books, the ‘Northern New Wave’.

2025

In November 2025 ‘Fragments of a Letter Found in a Dead Astronaut’s Possessions’, was included in the relaunched Worlds of IF (#179, November 2025), edited by Justin T O’Connor Sloane and Jean-Paul L Garnier. A poem, it is adapted as a stand-alone piece from ‘Concentrate 1’ where it first appeared as prose.

My poem ‘Ghosts’ had yet a new airing, in Electronic Brain #1, launched December 2005 from Space Cowboy Books. A production of Jean-Paul L Garnier’s it is surely to become a harbinger of the trend for retrofuturism. The edition also contains work by Eugen Bacon, Alison W Fuller, Tara Campbell, Rocco Harris and Dr Phoenix Alexander, as well as other older hands like Thomas M Disch, Charles Platt and John Clute.

2026

The shout in 2026 must go out for two undaunted periodicals, the newly relaunched Galaxy and the intrepid Emanations, both appearing April 2026. Galaxy included a reprinting of ‘Senseless’, a piece of juvenilia from my school magazine. In a piece of serendipity The St Christopher Magazine was edited by Charles Platt. Charles accepted my piece for publication, beginning a lifetime of working together on different book projects. Galaxy ran the piece alongside a totally up-to-date interview with me by Jean-Paul L Garnier from The Star*light SciFaiku Review #3, Spring 2023 – from sixty years later! My concerns about the dangers of war and the damage to the environment were identical in both.

In its twelfth annual edition Emanations contained ‘The Little Arundalean’, Part 1 of a three-part memoir of my time at St Christopher School. Due to an interest in boarding education, Emanations editor Carter Kaplan virtually commissioned me to write this, although it had always been planned to form the opening of Driven by Anger, the new book length memoir above mentioned. Parts 1 and 2 are scheduled to appear in Emanations #13 and #14.

‘The Little Arundalean’ and its sequels are an exercise of memory in which I try to capture the boarding school St Christopher, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, as it was in 1957 when I first attended sixty-six years ago, and an attempt to describe how its then radical progressive co-educational teaching methods saved me from an unhappy fate in the ‘Army-style’ orthodox school system of the time.

I boarded there for six years from the age of ten. ‘St Chris’ was an unusual school even for its time. Founded in 1915 by Theosophists but Quaker-run when I attended, the school was not as liberal as Summerhill – lessons were compulsory – but it had a democratic foundation, was inclusive of the voice of its pupils, and over the years became the incubator of many who went on to be prominent creatives – Michael Winner, Jenny Diski, Paul Hamlyn, Elizabeth Jenkins, Prince Rupert Zu Loewenstein, to name a few.

From an artistic perspective there may be an interesting conjecture to make. After leaving school and becoming a contributor to New Worlds, Charles Platt then became the magazine’s designer (and finally its editor) and brought with him a certain gestalt. During the later large-format phase of New Worlds he hired onto the team a fellow St Christophean, the late author-designer Nigel Francis (Simon Francis as he became), to help cope with the increased workload. St Chris had a very particular atmosphere, and it could be said that with three practitioners, including me, having been drawn from it, the UK New Wave of Science Fiction owed something to its culture. To an old St Christophean like me, the magazine’s 1967-70 heyday stylistically as a whole is partly infused with the school’s unmistakable voice, at least the voice of St Chris as it was during our time there.

Finally, April 2026 saw publication in the Corridor8 Substack of ‘Circularisations’, Tom Dillon’s analysis of ‘Circularisation’, my most reprinted work, first published in New Worlds 1969. If you like contemporary visual art and writing then please think of supporting their substack.