SF INTERVIEW: GEORGE HAY - BY SPACE POSSESSED

GEORGE HAY:

‘BY SPACE POSSESSED’

1: ‘MAN, WOMAN,

AND ANDROID’

Once upon a pre-digital age, I made my first-ever sale to a science fiction anthology. Editor George Hay accepted my story “When The Music’s Over” for his 1974 ‘Stopwatch’ project, because he found it ‘chimes with the kind of anthology I’m doing’. By a torturous route I’d actually submitted it to George’s more academic magazine ‘Foundation’ – which didn’t publish fiction anyway! But he was nothing if not a creative editor. On a subsequent visit to seek him out, I discovered him – a tall slim man with an air of extraterrestrial preoccupation, thinning on top but with a surrounding fall of grey-white hair, living near Winchmore Hill in north London. His book-crammed maisonette was no.38B, which means it consisted of the upper storey of the house, reached by ascending an exterior staircase.

Once within, head-angled to one side, I check out ageing novels and magazine-editions crammed into his shelves, carefully extricating garish softbacks for inspection at random. Doing so jogs the memory of a conversation in one of his tales, ‘and what do you find in books?’ his character asks, only to provide his own self-answer, ‘words – which are but thoughts reified, immensely compacted. The glittering ores of intellect’. Many of the books in his shelves were by him, with covers showing bulbous spaceships and heroic twenty-fifth-century astronauts set against the backdrop of swirling psychedelic planets, although they don’t all necessarily bear his name. During the 1950’s he was known to share the publisher-owned pseudonym ‘King Lang’ with EC Tubb and John W Jennison, or he might be ‘Roy Sheldon’ or ‘George Hayman’, so it’s no longer certain with any degree of accuracy, who actually wrote what. A puzzle to archivists now, it didn’t seem to matter at the time. Selling for just one-shilling-and-sixpence old-money the slim Hamilton paperbacks were less concerned with ‘the glittering ores of intellect’, in preference to their cover-boast ‘We Never Publish A Dull Story’.

In George’s case, he somehow managed to fuse elements of both. His ‘Flight Of The ‘Hesper’’ (1952) comes emblazoned in a colourful jacket-illustration of spacers apparently marooned on the hostile surface of a barren world, helplessly watching a needle-sharp spaceship cutting through the alien skies towards some kind of spherical proto-Death Star. The blurb announces it as ‘A Yarn For Science-Fiction Enthusiasts’. But although the story bears all the ingredients of a straightforward fifties generation-ship ‘yarn’ he can’t resist making the psychological programming of the crew a significant sub-theme. His space-farers are conditioned to follow the mission – the ‘chart’, and despite their attempts to break free and establish a colony on the new world glimpsed on the cover, the agoraphobic contradictions they experience on the planet’s surface set up a mental conflict they’re unable to resolve, and they’re forced back to the ‘Hesper’.

This preoccupation with ‘psych-dynamics’ already looks forward to Hay’s interest in Dianetics, and the ‘lateral thinking’ theories of Dr Edward De Bono. Elsewhere on his bookshelf, his ‘Man, Woman – And Android’ (1951) anticipates the kind of holo-suites later enjoyed by the crews of Star Trek’s ‘Enterprise’. Within the pleasure planetoid Paradise his protagonists can stroll the ‘Hesperian Gardens of Luna’ with its score of artificial suns, or experience its other virtually-projected realms. While his androids, with their number-designation branded into their foreheads, have their life-spans prematurely terminated ‘at the end of their statutory sixty years’ before they can become ‘wild’ – like the ‘Bladerunner’ replicants to come. A precaution imposed following a Philadelphia android insurrection. ‘Never trust an android’.

We sauntered down tree-shaded Compton Road to the comfortable twilight ‘dimnity’ of his local pub lounge where he allows me to ply him with drinks, presumably in recognition of his role in realising my first print sale. But the advice he dispensed is generously practical. He’d taken care to establish copyright of my story with me, allowing me to resell it to other markets. Which I do. Alert and analytical, he was no dreamer. Or just possibly, a practical dreamer. Lanky, and hyper-articulate, or – as David Langford perceptively recalls, ‘like William Hartnell playing the first ‘Dr Who’, peering through thick glasses invariably mended with sticky tape’, he regales me with tales of then-recent events. About how he’d met Timothy Leary’s wife and entourage at a London Press Conference for the LSD guru and Futurologist, ‘she seemed nice enough, but I felt that, knowingly or unknowingly, someone was being taken for a ride. Apart from anything else, the event was a shambles, organisationally speaking...’ He pauses, and picks himself up in mid-story, ‘well – admittedly, I rate pretty low in the neatness stakes myself, but on the other hand, I think I have a reasonable track record on results achieved. If you have chaos, and no results, someone’s cheating…’ George Hay was a man who strove for, and more often achieved, a run of impressive ‘results’.

Born with the convolute name Oswyn Robert Tregonwell Hay, in Chelsea in 1922, according to SF legend he was pronounced ineducable at the age of fourteen due to a ‘time-wasting’ obsession with reading ‘Amazing Stories’ and ‘Astounding Stories’ magazines. ‘I used to sneak out of boarding school to come back with copies of ‘Astounding’ hidden under my jacket’ he tells me, chortling at the memory, ‘when on holiday I showed some of these to my uncle, who was by way of being a competent amateur scientist. He was horrified!’ Yet George would stay true to their shiny lure of the future throughout his life. Who were his favourites? ‘In the very early years, people like Clark Ashton Smith and John W Campbell. I suppose it’s hardly necessary to say I’m an admirer of Campbell, warts and all? It may well be that we are still suffering from an overdose of larger-than-life characters from thirties SF, created by writers like Campbell and Heinlein. I don’t feel that way myself, and could go on reading them forever, if they were available. But that may just be put down to galloping immaturity on my part! After all, for a long time I was the only person to have kept him in print in this country.’

Like others of his generation SF was always more than mere escapism, it was a blueprint for possible futures. A practical user’s guide to tomorrow that runs through his brain like ticker-tape. The ‘dead hand of the past’ was an encumbrance, as his character Cantow reflects. Why do we call the control-centre of a planetoid-sized spaceship ‘the bridge’? ‘Because the centre of control on sea-going vessels back on Terra was called the bridge – always that dead hand of the past reaching out...’ In ‘Flight Of The ‘Hesper’’ the two mindsets are embodied within the crew, the original oldster Earth-born’s who were idiotically ‘clinging to outmoded terminology that meant nothing’, and the impatient young space-born’s eager for change. George Hay’s anti-sentimental allegiances always lay with the future.

When I probe him about ‘those ‘Authentic’/Hamilton novels’ he admits ‘my memories of those are pretty dim. Ah, the mists of Time! I have a problem here. The fact is that at that time I – and I’m sure other writers, received marvellous backing and advice from the then-editor, whose name I’m quite unable to recall. No – sorry to be awkward, but I’m sure it wasn’t (‘Authentic SF’ magazine editor) HJ Campbell, I’ve a vague recollection of meeting the latter once – chap with a black beard, I think. But no, another name comes to mind – ‘Hamilton’, but I couldn’t be sure of that. He was a very able Scot, who moved on afterwards to what I hope were more profitable ventures. Backroom boys such as this man, and Ted Carnell, really don’t get the praise they deserve...’ In an interview with the ‘Drilkjis’ fanzine he confided ‘do you know how I got into professional SF writing? I was working for the Refuse Collection Department of Camden Borough Council – I think it was still Hampstead in those days, when I wrote a first chapter-and-outline of a novel and sent it blind to Hamilton-Stafford. Gordon Landsborough was editing for them, the man who later founded Armada Books and other first-rate series. He liked it, and said I should finish it. No contract, mark you! (so was Landsborough – no Scot, but born in Huddersfield, George’s sponsor…? Maybe) I dropped my work, let my rent pile up, and sent in the finished product. At £1 per thousand-words for 36,000 words, by the time I got the cheque it all went in rent! Well, it was a start, not everyone sells the first book they write.’

‘After all, even if it was in the fifties, I had every novel – save one, I wrote published! But my novels were pretty derivative’ he tells me. ‘Mind you, when I re-read one of them, about ten years back, I found it no worse than some contemporary writing I could mention, and an American contact tried out one of them on his (adult) son, who seemed to like it. But they lacked originality…’ I’m not so sure. The ‘man’ in ‘Man, Woman – And Android’ is Flane ‘Barr’ Roth, on an undercover mission to ‘Paradise’. The forty-mile-long worldlet which is caught up in a furtive undeclared stealth-war in which Terra is besieged by the League of break-away colonies of Mars, Venus and the Jupiter moon-system. The ‘woman’ is the militaristic Venusian Spartiate Aristarch Sandra, with whom he develops a mutually hazardous attraction. Returning to Earth with his loyal android Andrew X079, Flane finds himself in the midst of an android revolt, at the exact time that a five-thousand-ship invasion fleet is approaching Terra. It’s inventive fast-action stuff as he escapes the android-controlled city of New Plymouth only to be beaten and imprisoned as a suspected android-agent in human-controlled Frentaton, even as he attempts to alert the World Council of the imminent invasion from space. There are interplanetary-battles, vaporised cities, and hair-raising pursuits, until it becomes apparent that the android-component of the occupying League force is also in revolt. The novel takes its climax back to opalescent Paradise, to investigate the ‘strange and vicious pleasure’ to be found ‘in its lower levels, where few penetrated, and fewer still returned’. Here it’s revealed to Flane and Sandra that Andrew X079 is, in fact, one of a surviving group of the original ancient Martian race who are benevolently influencing human destiny, and have genetically engineered them to bridge the human-android division and so found a new evolved future human race…

‘I’m all for hard-SF myself’ he explains, ‘provided it has a good human-character and metaphysical basis. Also hard plotting. Have you noticed how pedestrian much of Larry Niven’s narration is? – yet one enjoys him, because the science is ingenious and the plotting first-rate. ‘Sword-and-Sorcery’ is not something I care much about, and – curiously enough, my finding is that the best writing in that area are completely overlooked anyway. In my view, one novel by Fletcher Pratt is worth a bookshelf-full of Mike Moorcock’s, I think Mike is a really great literary critic who got lost en-route to the publishers! And who’s ever heard of Fletcher Pratt now, save a few of us…?’

2: THE

DISAPPEARING FUTURE

For George Hay there can be no straightforward linear career-outline. No ‘he wrote this story then he wrote that story’, ‘he edited this anthology then he edited that anthology’, ‘he published this book then he published that book’. He was far too diverse an activist for such a simple schematic.

Once upon a digital present, I discussed researching George Hay’s fifties writing with SF poet Steve Sneyd. Steve cautioned me that George had no interest in the past. I’d get no nostalgic reminiscing from him. George’s concern was always with what he was doing now, and the new projects he’d be initiating tomorrow. Steve’s comments remind me of the time George contacted me about a scheme he’d co-founded called the ‘Applied Science Fiction Association’, encouraging me to submit examples of ideas extracted from science fiction that could be patented and turned into marketable products. It’s in this spirit that the SF community remembers him through the ‘George Hay Memorial Lecture’ at the UK-SF Eastercon. With the 2009 event in Bradford given over to a researcher on a self-replicating machine, a device that ‘prints’ 3D objects. Chris Anderson – ‘Wired’ editor, enthused over the potential of such new programs. It’s true that there’s little evidence of products being marketed as a direct result of the ‘Applied Science Fiction Association’. But to George, SF could provide ‘an armamentarium of tools for coping with the future’, and he would certainly have been intrigued by this step towards science fiction’s ‘replicator’.

To SF academic Brian Ash, George was ‘the archetypal British SF enthusiast’, a man who ‘has pterodactyls on his letter-heading and almost as many ideas flying in different directions as Leonardo’ (in ‘Who’s Who In Science Fiction’). It was this relentless enthusiasm that led him into a brief connection with L Ron Hubbard’s quasi-cults, but also determined he’d outgrow them – ‘he distinguishes between Dianetics, which interested him in its early years, and Scientology, whose paranoid bureaucracy he couldn’t stomach and which declared him a Suppressive Person’. He went on to become communications officer for ‘Spectrum’, which he described as ‘Britain’s only upbeat futures-orientated society’. And his was the original ‘think-tank’ concept that led to the establishment of ‘my brainchild’, the ‘Science Fiction Foundation’ in October 1970, with John Brunner, Kenneth Bulmer and James Blish. He began by ‘taking advantage of ‘Mr Xerox’s invention’ at the North London Polytechnic for serious SF agitational-propaganda, before a ‘coup’ handed over editorial chores to Peter Nicholls, Chris Priest and Malcolm Edwards. Although this shifted the Foundation into a more academic-critical direction than he’d initially intended, he remained a provocative vice-president. Steve Sneyd reflects how ‘so many of George Hay’s projects/plans could go on forever, from the inclusion of poetry in the first issue of ‘Foundation’. George admits ‘I had to use my own as I couldn’t find anyone else’s on time’. To the ‘postcard encyclopaedia’ plan. Postcard Encyclopaedia…? ‘Sample ones appeared, and he spoke of having a publisher interested. The idea was that it would consist of postcards, each summarising some aspect of human knowledge. Whether the idea was that they’d be collected like a part-work, or bought all at once…?’

George’s only loyalty to past-time was through honouring its legacy. By editing the stories of innovative writer and groundbreaking ‘Astounding’ editor John W Campbell – as he explained, ‘first with that ‘Tandem’ collection – they used my blurb but didn’t credit me, and then with ‘The Best Of John W Campbell’ (1973). And he was instrumental in the republication of several long out-of-print HG Wells’ titles, through his ‘HG Wells Society: Starlight Research’. Meanwhile, as an anthologist George followed ‘Stopwatch’ with two volumes of ‘Pulsar’ – ‘hampered by my publisher’s passion for Big Names’. Volume one (1978) includes Chris Boyce and Stan Gooch as well as David Langford, Ian Watson, Bob Shaw – and even HG Wells (“Foretelling The Future” – ‘a real scoop, the only article HG Wells ever wrote about the technicalities of writing SF’). The second volume (1979) adds Robin Douglas and Perry A Chapdelaine as well as Robert Holdstock and EC Tubb. The ratio the publisher demanded was 80/20 – ‘with the 80% being stories by ‘name’ authors’. ‘I suppose you haven’t considered changing your name to Asimov’ he playfully suggests, to enable adding one of my tales to ‘Pulsar 2’! So I was far from the only tyro writer to benefit from his largesse, as his partner, Mollie Gillam points out, he was ‘generous with his ideas and time in encouraging young writers’. Langford readily acknowledges the debt. But although he championed and promoted the work of new writers, George had little sympathy with what he saw as the bleak negativity of the so-called SF ‘New Wave’.

Some brief time after our conversation in the comfortable twilight ‘dimnity’ of his local pub lounge, he complained to me ‘I have an instinctive antipathy towards stories about Lost Tribes dying in the post-apocalypse waste-lands. One has to remember that the novel really came into its own with the Romantic Revolution, which is to say, with the Industrial Revolution. It had to do with the actions and reactions of people dealing with a rapidly developing culture, with how they adapted, or failed to adapt to change. JG Ballard’s characters seem to ‘handle’ change by drifting with it. It’s a way of survival, I’ll concede. But in a broad sense, it fails. And I think most readers are right in not wishing to identify overmuch with failure. Literature of the Romantic period, which for me is still the best, cannot survive without some sense of struggle set in a larger context – a struggle which perhaps may not be won, but which at least takes place on the understanding that it is possible to win. If the fight is lost from the start, then there is no tension, and hence no story, just a succession of events. I might also add that there can also be no real tragedy, for tragedy is impossible without some kind of greatness, even if it be only hinted at. One gets back then to George Gissing on the one hand and ‘Mr Pooter’ (from George Grossmith’s ‘The Diary Of A Nobody’, 1892) on the other. So I feel that even crude two-dimensional ‘death-to-the-scaly-alien’ type stories have – in a sense, something more real than passive descriptions. Of course, one really seeks stories with the best of both worlds. That they can, in fact, be achieved, is shown by the deserved success of such stories as ‘The Left Hand Of Darkness’ (by Ursula K Le Guin, 1969) which deals – as I read it, with the nature of justice and honour, reinforced by the authenticity of the background detail, and by the ambiguity of the various sub-cultures dealt with.’

A pause. ‘I don’t think what I say is dependent on my age and generation, though obviously it does affect the issue. At my time of life, one begins to get the feeling of re-living the decline of the Roman Empire – originally played at thirty-three-and-a-third, but this time at seventy-eight rpm, and the last thing one wants to do is envisage even further social breakdowns. However, having seen so many novels along these lines, and noted that of late they have often been very commercially successful, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that they represent a real psychic need among younger readers today. A natural reaction, I suppose, to the grey society in which we live. Whether they’ll actually enjoy the day the water stops coming out of the taps and the box refuses to switch on, is another question…!’ While his enthusiasm for innovation was unable to extend to graphic novels, ‘wars and recession are inevitable in a culture that seems devoted to preventing people from actually thinking and forbidding them access to anything but the most trashy literature. Repeat after me ‘A GRAPHIC NOVEL IS NOT A BOOK! It does not invoke discursive thought. If you want to see what people could produce when they did think, go back to medieval theology, or, more recently, such writers as Simone Weil… or, to come back to SF, how do you account for the fact that John Crowley’s ‘Little, Big (Or The Fairies’ Parliament)’ (Bantam Books, 1981), to my mind quite undoubtedly the best SF-Fantasy novel for many decades, is practically out of print…’

Inevitably, he had a solution. Even if it was more that a touch tongue-in-cheek! ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking of late that the rate at which genuine literary culture is being eroded in this society is so fast that it’s not sufficient only to make vital works available to readers, one should also have a class of people able to read and assimilate them in quantity and, having them in their heads, go round the country and enthuse others to do likewise. So what we need, then, is not just libraries and bookshops but, what I suppose one might refer to as travelling bards. After all, the Druids had ways of teaching that would seem far better than ours, and people are turned onto theatre by actual performance, not just by reading printed versions of the plays. What do you think?’ How could I argue? As Dave Langford observed, George was ‘a genuine, charming English eccentric, a Socialist of the old-fashioned idealistic kind’ (he told me ‘I used to be a press-hand for Sunbeam-Talbot during the war, though I solved the problem of boredom at that time by political involvement), ‘and also a man of weird erudition who – like Borges, had not only read everything, but specialised in books nobody reads any more’ A man as equally likely to quote cobwebbed philosophers such as Korzybski (a major influence on AE van Vogt), as Ouspensky…

3: ‘MORE YARNS

FOR SCIENCE FICTION

ENTHUSIASTS…’

Nevertheless, he did admit to me that ‘I’d like to get back to writing fiction. I have been toying with the idea of writing fiction once again, as a relief from endless editing. But what sort of fiction? I belong to the school that never knows what it’s going to write until it has written it, and can read it, so it can then reply to the question.’ And despite his reservations about the New Wave, with obstinate wilfulness he was quick to seize upon its potential for innovatory new literary freedoms. For ‘Science Fantasy’ and ‘Impulse’ magazines in 1965 and 1966 editor Kyril Bonfiglioli selected two of George’s brief ‘condensed novels’, written in an inventive playful mood far removed from his Hamilton and Curtis Warren 1950’s fiction. The two-page “Over And Out” comes in the form of blocks of experimental capitals, like concrete-poetry, representing an exchange of teleprinter bulletins complete with .Stop. punctuations, and hasty misspellings ‘POL POL OHA HA NO GOOD GOD GUD DO SOMETHING PLEASE PLOSE PLUZ’. Dated 11-8-1984 the print-outs come from the besieged PRESSCOMP where the computer systems are taking over, sealing exits and cutting phone lines in preparation for rewriting the history of the ‘BROTTISH EMPIRE AND THE AEMRICAN CONTINENT’. The recipient is their last hope, the Rutland Post Master, until it too is closed down.

“Synopsis” is an equally original premise, as the opening frame of what purports to be the ongoing plot of a lavish imaginary Space Opera serial, a ‘New Readers Start Here’ speed-reading update affectionately poking tongue-in-cheek satiric fun at his own galaxy-spanning fifties tales. Key-words are capitalised as, in his battle against the Outer Planets Federation space hero Terry Spanner borrows a Timewarper from the Allystra, a strange insectile race from lost planet Dis beyond Pluto, but – sabotaged by villainous traitor Aargh Parr, his ship plunges out-of-control towards New York. However, temporal conundrums thrown up by the coming impact mean that the war itself has been provoked by enigmatic mutant Kark Kurr, the child resulting from the rape of Terry’s fiancé by Aargh. Terry can only undo that history by prematurely operating the Timewarper, with unpredictable results, he could ‘materialise as a super-brain in the remote future, or as a cell in the gut of some Chicago gunsel of the 1920’s. Or as one of Napoleon’s slaughtered Old Guard at Waterloo. Or as Hitler’s moustache’. With just fifteen seconds to go to resolve the dilemma, the final line invites the reader to ‘NOW READ ON…’. There is no more.

Later still I was fortunate indeed to return his favour, and to be in a position to publish one of his own finest short-stories, “Of A Still Night” in ‘Ludds Mill’ (October 1982) magazine. I contrived the art-work to hopefully reflect the melancholy strangeness of his poetic vision. In his tale, wistful observers wait, ‘the dusk was the silence. The two men hung like shadows over the bridge. In the ebb of the sun the rails beneath them shimmered for a moment like water at noon. A moment only it was, then the rails sank with the light from night’. It is the near future of 1982, and the Simultaneity Drive has liberated travel with ‘half the population in speed-of-light transit at any given moment somewhere between, say, Moorgate and Mars Central’, with the ghosts of trains as a nostalgic haunting of older more leisurely modes of transportation. And one man, Tim Morgan, who becomes obsessed with tracking down and recording sightings within the abandoned London Underground network, building up a pattern, which enables him to predict and celebrate Wimbledon Station, 11:20 in late-August 2000, the very last ghost-train. Invited participants converge in mini-derigibles that drift along the District Line. As George himself wrote, about Walter De La Mare’s unusual novel ‘Henry Brocken’ (1904), ‘within its domain, one walks enchanted, yet it is not unrealistic… there is starlight, but there is also darkness’.

Soon after, with Mollie Gillam, George relocated to live in All Saints Street in Hastings – ‘my living conditions are probably the most comfortable I have ever enjoyed, and that in a quite blessed environment’, where he resumed his SF activity. To Steve Sneyd he was a walking-thinking hyperactive contradiction, a man whose capacity for ‘maddened exasperation’ was inseparably linked with ‘running an event like the ‘Hastings-Con’ totally single-handed organisation-wise, and creating real excitement’. An event that continued his track record of results achieved, ‘because, if you have chaos, and no results, someone’s cheating’. Then he became the victim of a hit-and-run accident in November 1994, suffering concussion and multiple leg fracture. With a humour that he would certainly have appreciated ‘Ansible’ reported that in the Cookson Ward of St Leonards Conquest Hospital he ‘was treated at length for delirium until medical staff realised he was telling them about the SF Foundation’! He died 3rd October 1997 following an operation. His relentless positivism determined his hatred of funerals. According to Mollie ‘he was a man without malice, kind, modest about his achievements. He preferred to remember friends in life’.

Today, as Dave Langford fondly recalls in his ‘Critical Mass’ column, ‘even now I half-await one more of George’s letters on the famous pterodactyl-headed notepaper, picked out on his ancient typewriter with a ribbon last changed in 1980, and outlining another amazing scheme to transform the world through Science Fiction’. Me too, Dave, me too…

GEORGE HAY:

BOOK BY BOOK

‘THIS PLANET FOR SALE’ by George Hay (November, 1951, Hamilton & Co). 110-pages, cover art by George Ratcliffe

‘TERRA!’ as by ‘King Lang’ (1951, Curtis Warren). 112-pages, cover art by Ray Theobald

‘MAN, WOMAN – AND ANDROID’ by George Hay (a ‘complete novel’ published as ‘Authentic Science Fiction’ magazine dated 15th June 1951, edited by ‘LG Holmes’ aka Gordon Holmes Landsborough), cover art by George Ratcliffe

‘MOMENT OUT OF TIME’ by George Hay as ‘Roy Sheldon’ (1952, Hamilton Prehistoric Series) ‘A Fast-Moving Yarn of Man’s Struggle For Survival’. 109-pages, cover art by J Pollack

‘FLIGHT OF THE ‘HESPER’’ by George Hay (1952, Hamilton). Cover art by George Ratcliffe

‘BEYOND FANTASY FICTION’ (July 1954), magazine edited by HL Gold. Short story “It’s A Gift” as by ‘George Hayman’

‘HELL HATH FURY’ edited by George Hay (1963 Fantasy Fictional, Neville Spearman) with Cleve Cartmill (‘Hell Hath Fury’), Fritz Leiber Jrn (‘The Bleak Shore’), Robert Bloch (‘The Cloak’), P Schuyler Miller (‘The Frog’), Jane Rice (‘The Refugee’), L Ron Hubbard (‘The Devil’s Rescue’), AM Phillips (‘The Extra Bricklayer’) – stories collected from ‘Unknown Worlds’ magazine 1939-1943. Preface by George Hay

‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.71’ (April 1965) features George Hay short story “Over And Out”

‘IMPULSE no.4’ (June 1966) features George Hay short story “Synopsis”

‘THE DISAPPEARING FUTURE: A SYMPOSIUM OF SPECULATION’ edited by George Hay (1970, Panther ISBN 0-5860-3323-8) with James Blish, Michael Moorcock, John W Campbell Jr, Samuel R Delaney, Anne McCaffrey, Dr Christopher Evans, David I Masson, Christopher Priest, IF Clarke, Perry A Chapdelaine, Edward Misham, Anthony Haden-Guest, Kit Pedler

‘SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW no.43’ (March 1971) with George Hay poem “Twenty Years On”. Edited by Richard E Geis

‘THE BEST OF JOHN W CAMPBELL’ (1973, Sidgwick & Jackson) edited by George Hay. Introduction by James Blish. With ‘Who Goes There’, ‘Forgetfulness’, ‘Double Minds’, ‘Out Of Night’, ‘The Cloak Of Aesir’ & bibliography

‘STOPWATCH’ edited by George Hay (1974, New English Library) with John Brunner (‘The Protocols Of The Elders Of Britain’), Robert P Holdstock (‘Ash, Ash’), AE van Vogt (‘All We Have On This Planet’), Ian Watson (‘EA 5000: Report On The Effects Of Riot Gas’), Christopher Priest (‘The Invisible Men’), Andrew Darlington (‘When The Music’s Over’) and others

‘THE EDWARD DE BONO SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION’ edited by George Hay (1976, Elmfield Press, Leeds ISBN 0-7057-0068-2), a selection of stories chosen to illustrate Dr De Bono’s theories of ‘lateral thinking’ from ‘Astounding/ Analog’ 1940-57, ‘Galaxy’ 1952, and ‘If’ 1964, with Raymond F Jones (‘Noise Level’), L Sprague De Camp (‘Hyperpelosity’ & ‘The Warrior Race’), AE van Vogt (‘The Monster’), Eric Frank Russell (‘The Glass Eye’), William Tenn (‘Firewater’) and others

‘THE FOOD OF THE GODS’ by HG Wells (November 1976, Sphere reissue), with introduction by George Hay

‘THE NECRONOMICON: THE BOOK OF DEAD NAMES’ edited by George Hay (1978 Neville Spearsman, Corgi, ISBN 0-552-980935), a ‘semi-serious reconstruction’ of HP Lovecraft’s ‘unspeakable forbidden’ book, introduction by Colin Wilson, with short George Hay fiction “Letter From Dr Stanislavs Hinterstoisser”, plus L Sprague De Camp, Christopher Frayling & Angela Carter, Gavin Stamp & Robert Turner (a practising occultist who devised Clthulhu’s incantations)

‘PULSAR I’ (1978, Penguin) editor George Hay, selecting David Langford (‘The Still Small Voice Inside’), Bob Shaw (‘Small World’), HG Wells (‘Foretelling The Future’), Ian Watson (‘Immune Dreams’), Christopher Evans (‘The Time Travellers’), AE van Vogt (‘Death Talk’) and others

‘PULSAR 2’ (1979, Penguin) editor George Hay, selecting EC Tubb (‘The Knife’), Robert P Holdstock (‘High Pressure’), Christopher Holdstock (‘The Human Operator’), Alan Dean Foster (‘What Do the Simple Folk Do?), Garry Kilworth (‘A Warrior Falls’) and others

‘GHOSTS AND SCHOLARS no.1: THE M.R. JAMES NEWSLETTER’ (1979) edited by Rosemary Pardoe (Haunted Library) includes George Hay story “A Serious Call” – ‘my story is set in a London Polytechnic, and any ‘horror’ involved concerns the truly ghastly nature of such institutions. A novel approach to the subject, I like to think’ (from a letter to me dated 27 December 1979). The story is reprinted in ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII’ edit Karl Edward Wagner (Daw, 1980), and ‘Horrorstory: Volume 3’ edit Karl Edward Wagner (Underwood-Miller, 1992)

‘MORE GHOSTS AND SCHOLARS’ (1980) edited by Rosemary Pardoe (Haunted House) includes George Hay short story “All That Flies”

‘LUDDS MILL no.18’ (October 1982) features George Hay short story “Of A Still Night”

‘GHOSTS AND SCHOLARS no.7’ (1985) includes George Hay short story “An Error Of Long Standing”. Art by Alan Hunter

‘THE LETTERS OF JOHN W CAMPBELL Volume 1’ (1985, AC Projects ISBN 0-931150-16-7) the texts of Campbell’s letters to, or about, 283 SF writers and scientists, edited by Perry A Chapdelaine, Sr, Tony Chapdelaine, and George Hay

‘PAPERBACK INFERNO no.55’ (August 1985, BSFA publ), edited by Andy Sawyer, with George Hay article “Keeping Books In Print… By One Who Knows”

‘HENRY BROCKEN: HIS TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES IN THE RICH, STRANGE, SCARCE-IMAGINABLE REGIONS OF ROMANCE’ by Walter de la Mere (1904 novel, reprinted by TalisMan Books/ Lewis-Graham, 1987) Introduction by George Hay

‘THE R’LYET TEXT’ by Robert Turner (1995, Skoob Books, ISBN 1-871438-90-X) Preface by George Hay, with introduction by Colin Wilson

‘FOUNDATION no.70’ (Summer 1997) George Hay review of ‘Retrieved From The Future’ by John Seymour. A frequent reviewer for ‘Foundation’ George also reviewed from ‘Black Destroyer’ by AE van Vogt in no.24 (February 1982) to ‘World Brain’ by HG Wells for no.66 (Spring 1996)

‘THE INHERITORS’ by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (1999, Liverpool University Press ISBN 0-85323-560-0) Foreword by George Hay

References made to ‘Critical Mass’ by David Langford, in ‘Odyssey’ magazine (no.2, 1998)