The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

The note about George MacBeth from the editor of Ambit said in hasty script: . . . like many Scots, has lived most of his life in England. He is a BBC producer for the Third Programme . . . Much of his poetry is about the violence associated with fascism. He also has a major interest in experimental writing, and has written one poem in the form of a card game and another in the form of an encyclopedia. He is tall, dresses very correctly in dark-blue English suits with white collar. Sports a small ginger mustache, likes cats and women, etc.

Almost on the heels of that note came another, telling me MacBeth was on his way to the States. (Turned out he was here on a cultural-exchange thing, on the invitation of the Council on Leaders and Specialists of the Experiment in International Living: State Dept.)

We had a fast-talking lunch, and I acquired some further vital statistics. He was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, in 1932; is married to a geneticist. Two volumes of his own poetry in print: The Broken Places and The Doomsday Book (Scorpion Press, London, 1963 and 1965). Also edited two anthologies for Penguin: Sick Verse (1963) and Animal Verse (1965). In 1964, he wrote, produced, financed, and acted in [I transcribe here from table-napkin notes] “The Doomsday Show”—-a post-nuclear poetry cabaret show at the Establishment Club in London—See poetry and s-f as sharing a common imagination—Admire “calamity fiction” of John Christopher (particularly The Death of Grass) and see Jules Verne as one of the greatest of Victorian writers—Think poetry can take over the plots and imagery of s-f and give it new emotional depth—and it can offer new techniques (e.g. Ballard’s short-paragraph, cut-up sequence pieces which go back ultimately to the American poet Brion Gysin, who influenced Burroughs)—Best s-f poet so far is the English writer D. M. Thomas, author of (as yet on published) Launching Pad.

I understand a copy of launching Pad is on its way to me; in return, some recommendations for Mr. MacBeth—high grade “calamity fiction” from last year’s New Worlds: Charles Platt’s “Lone Zone,” James Colvin’s “The Mountain,” and Colin R. Fry’s “The Night of the Gyul.” And Gerald Kersh, coming up—