Duncan Lunan has many strings to his bow, as a researcher, tutor, critic, editor, lecturer and broadcaster – chiefly on astronomy, spaceflight and related subjects. Best known today as a non-fiction author, his books include Man and the Stars (1974), Man and the Planets (1984) and Incoming Asteroid! (2013). Yet his influence on science fiction writing, especially in Scotland, has been significant – in part due to his role in the launch of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle, ‘alumni’ of which include Gary Gibson, Michael Cobley and Hal Duncan. He also edited Starfield: Science Fiction by Scottish Writers, the first anthology of its kind, published in 1989.
So, Duncan, when did you realise you would be a writer?
Duncan Lunan: I can remember not being able to read, shortly before my third birthday, and it just came as a package – suddenly I could read and I could read anything. I can remember – it might have been as much as a year later – my mother trying to teach me to read from Rupert Bear in the Daily Express, and I was pretending that I couldn’t, and I was meanwhile reading the editorial next to it. I was writing by the time I was four; I even produced a hand-written newspaper. By the time I went to school I had actually started writing poetry, which very quickly got knocked out of me! As the the youngest child in the class, who could already read and write, I was madly popular with an entire class of older children who couldn’t. But there it was; I just was going to be a writer.
Were you drawn to science fiction at an early age?
DL: Not especially. As regards astronomy and space, I knew it was there. I remember my father stopping the car between Troon and Prestwick to watch the Northern Lights, and they got me up to watch an eclipse of the Moon. That same year, 1950, there was the Blue Sun. That was caused by a smog of oil droplets that had drifted across Greenland and Iceland and back down over Northern Europe from forest fires in Canada. Granny took me down to the beach to see it. And it was totally bizarre; the sun was blue, the sky was bronze, and the whole familiar landscape of Troon beach was alien, and I remember thinking to myself: “This is like being on another planet.” I had the concept already by then, being on other planets. But my first love was still the sea.
What converted me was The Lost Planet on BBC Radio Children’s Hour. And then I started to get into Dan Dare; fortuitously (newspaper strip) Jeff Hawke started in the Daily Express about that time. I bullied my parents into getting the Young Traveller in Space by Arthur C Clarke for my eighth birthday. From then on I was totally hooked by the spaceflight side. I got into Journey Into Space with the second serial, but I didn’t read a lot beside the comics until a lot later. I got into Arthur C Clarke and Fred Hoyle in my early teens; ironically, it was when I started going to the Scottish branch of the British Interplanetary Society in 1962, that a friend called Andy Nimmo encouraged me to start reading Asimov, Heinlein, Sheckley and Van Vogt – and the whole thing broadened out from there. By the time I got to university, I was reading SF quite avidly.
Troon, a small seaside town in south west Scotland, doesn’t strike me as being an easy place to track down science fiction, especially back in the 1950s.
DL: There was a very good bookshop on Ayr Street, Troon, that did have a pretty good selection of SF when I wasn’t reading it, but there’s an article to be written about the difficulty of getting SF in the 1960s. The magazines Fantastic and Amazing could only be had from Glasgow’s Central and St Enoch Stations; one took one, and one took the other. Even more weirdly, the Galaxy group [of magazines] – Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow – could only be had from a small chain of three pornographic bookshops surrounding the city’s then three railway stations, and they took one each – so you had to visit all three!
The other major channel was to find out where the second-hand bookshops were near the bus stations, because this was where American servicemen coming in from the Holy Loch would disembark, and dump a load of paperbacks and magazines to get drink money. There was a very good one on Argyle Street; I had a pretty good working relationship with the chap who ran that. He knew I would be in once a week or so.
So when did you start writing SF?
DL: Again, that was very early on. Once I’d got hooked on Journey Into Space, I started writing my own, but I was aware of the inadequacies of most of it. When I was about 13, I wrote one which other people typed up for me, and I sent to Collins and various other people, and received polite replies – “lots of remarkable ideas here, keep at it” – that kind of thing.
Do you remember your first published story?
DL: During the vacations while I was at university, I was writing a novel, and a strange chain of events put me in a position to offer it to John W Campbell [the writer and editor who arguably shaped the Golden Age of Science Fiction in America – Editor]. It all had to do with how we met at the 1965 World Science Fiction Convention in London. I’d come off a Vespa scooter and had cut my knee badly, so I was wearing my father’s kilt with the officer’s jacket. Campbell wanted to know where he could get a jacket like that. It was one of these quite bizarre moments in one’s life, when Mrs John W Campbell said to me: “If you can spare a moment, my husband would like to speak with you.” I also ended up escorting his daughter to the banquet. I had no problem with that; she was very nice. The upshot was, trading on that, I was able to write to Campbell and say: “Here is the novel I told you about.”
Although he didn’t buy it, he got me a contract with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, which was then the one that all the big SF people were with. Meredith made my first actual sale, which was to Fantastic and Amazing, in 1967, but that didn’t come out until 1974. My first professionally published story was “The Moon of Thin Reality” in Galaxy in July 1970; basically a ‘spaceship in trouble’ story, set inside a Dyson sphere. The editors at Galaxy were fooled by it into thinking that I must be an astrodynamist of note, and they wanted to do a profile of me, but dropped the idea when they discovered I wasn’t. But they still got their art editor Jack Gaughan to do the cover, and everybody went: “Who is this client of Meredith who gets a Gaughan cover on his first published story?”
This was enough to persuade my father that I should dump my dead end office job and go full time, which took a little bit of persuasion because my friend Chris Boyce had tried it before me and not made it. He’d had to go back to the newspapers after six months. My father was also wary of the whole deal, but eventually suggested that if I was ever going to be a professional writer, this was the time to do it – so I did, and here I am!
Initially it worked; I started dashing off stories and immediately sold the first three, but I was then cut off from the US market by the 1971 UK postal strike. There was no market on this side of the Atlantic at that time; in any case, my contract with Meredith was exclusive. As I anticipated, when the strike ended there was a glut of stories by British authors competing for slots that had already been filled by US authors during the hiatus. Eventually Meredith did sell four (of my stories) but what I had realised was: this wasn’t going to work, so I started, for the first time since my teens, to start writing non-fiction again. That led to Man and the Stars. Non-fiction has dominated ever since. In that first phase I sold nine stories; I’m now up to 34, but that’s after a further 40 years, so it’s only very occasionally now that I write fiction. I keep saying I’ll go back to it, but there’s always another non-fiction opportunity to take up.
Did you ever consider writing a novel?
DL: In fact, I had two big ideas for novel sequences, neither of which got published. I had this big series about a space liner with more than a little influence from my old interest in the sea; there were definitely echoes of Percy F Westerman there. But I’m not always at the right place at the right time, even though it was the novel that had convinced John W Campbell to get me the contract with Meredith. Part of the other idea got ripped off for a television series which, on legal advice, I can’t say too much about. I had actually reached the stage of exchanging contracts with Bill Meadow Books, who then decided not to do it after all.
The annoying thing is that Meredith later came back to me and said: “The market has opened up for series, and we know you have two unpublished series, do you want to blow the dust off them?” I looked at it, but there simply wasn’t time – I was on a deadline with Man and the Stars and couldn’t do it. So at the point when Dune opened up that market, I wasn’t in a place where I could take that opportunity. So to this day, no novels; I’ve got one in mind – well, Mars is in fashion at the moment, and it’s a Mars novel. If I ever get all my other commitments out of the way…
You still kept in touch with SF, however, as a reviewer for the then Glasgow Herald (now The Herald) newspaper.
DL: My achievement, I suppose, was that I got SF to the point that it was being reviewed monthly, where previously it had not been reviewed at all. Then the book editor was replaced by John Linklater, who hated genre fiction and very quickly got rid of me.
With the 200th anniversary of the paper coming up the following year, however, my friend Chris Boyce – by then working there – persuaded them that they should have an SF short story competition. It was extremely successful – the first one attracted over 300 entries, although a full third ended on the line: “And his name was Adam, and her name was Eve.”
Then Ann Karkalas, of the Adult & Continuing Education Department at the University of Glasgow, asked if I would do a writing class. So, before returning all the competition manuscripts, I turned the cover sheets of contact details over to the University who did a mail shot to everyone within 50 miles. That ensured enough students for the class to go ahead. Initially it was for 10 weeks, at the end of which – because it had kept up the numbers – Ann asked if they would like a second term. One of the things I’d done towards the end of the first was to run a workshop, and people – Michael Cobley and the rest – said yes, we would like a second term, but we want it to be workshop-based. So the second term was almost entirely workshops and, at the end of that, basically we all said that we didn’t want to stop! So the workshops continued, and have continued to this day.
How important do you think the Circle has been in supporting new authors?
DL: The Circle held a 21st party, during which a toast to me was raised. What I said in reply was: “You’d all have made it under your own individual talents; the most we can say here is that we haven’t done you any harm. Hopefully, we’ve encouraged you and pointed you in the right direction.”
What I think I can say is that everybody who has stuck with the Glasgow group has achieved publication of one form or another. But the Circle wasn’t my idea. Even having that second term consist of workshops came from the people there. I was just in the right place at the right time to make it happen, and am very pleased about that.
How has SF publishing changed during your lifetime?
DL: Just fairly recently I reviewed August Derleth’s collected reviews from Fantasy and Science Fiction, for Interzone. One of the things he was really concerned about (in the 1970s) was that fantasy looked set to drive SF out of the market altogether. Well that didn’t happen; thanks to Star Wars, suddenly there was a boom for SF again, but it was action-adventure rather than what tended to be described as more cerebral SF.
What I’ve become aware of, since I started reviewing for Interzone is that there’s now a whole new genre of very long, cerebral SF by the likes of Peter Hamilton, which I hadn’t really been aware of and am catching up with now.
Also, there are the series which are targeted at a comparatively younger audience, and I don’t think they’re all that good. With some series, all the good ideas are in the first book. That seem to me the way that things are going, looking at the lists, but there’s still good stuff out there.
Is there still a market for short stories?
DL: Well, I certainly hope so! Indeed I think it’s an excellent thing that Shoreline of Infinity has got launched, because there have been at least three attempts since the 1950s to have a science fiction magazine based in Scotland, Nebula being the first. It’s good to see these guys getting on with it.
Perhaps this is where the influence of electronic publishing impacts; for me it’s completely changed things. Print-on-demand technology has made it possible to get back into publishing my kind of book for the first time in years – immediately, four of them! There’s a backlog to clear, with at least another four in prospect. But beyond that, I’ve got other ideas. I’ve been promising for a couple of years to do a popular version of Children of the Sky; now that I’ve got all the facts out there, I can do the story as a narrative. And there’s still that Mars novel. One way or another, I’ve got all the work I can handle!
First published in Shoreline of Infinity #2.
