Brian Stableford
interviewed by Barbara Godwin
 Brian
Stableford published his 100th book on 5 September 2006, a few weeks
after his 58th birthday, 41 years after the publication of his first
short story in the November 1965 issue of Science-Fantasy and
37 years after the publication of his first book, Cradle of the Sun,
as half of an Ace double in November 1969. This interview, conducted
by Barbara Godwin--one of the students he taught while briefly employed
as a part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at what is now the University
of Winchester--reflects on the experiences of that phase of his life
and looks forward to the next.
[Interview with Brian Stableford, conducted 12-17
August 2006 by Barbara Godwin]
Barbara Godwin: Your
enormous writing output spans not only science fiction and fantasy,
but popular non-fiction, editing, translation and learned articles.
How did you find the time to fit in an academic career as well?
Brian Stableford: I didn't, really.
I did make a brief effort to concentrate on my academic career when
I was given tenure in my job at the University of Reading in the early
1980s, and actually gave up fiction-writing for a few years in 1981-85,
but it came to nothing. I had no takers for most of the research projects
I wanted to take on, and the only academic book I ever managed to publish--my
study of Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950--only sold 157
copies, so it seemed like a waste of time. In those days, 157 copies
seemed a derisory total--nowadays, alas, I can only dream of my books
selling as many as that. At any rate, once I had resumed writing fiction
in 1986 the die was cast; I was nearly forty, and whatever I chose to
do at that point had to count as a lifelong commitment because there
would be no further opportunity to switch back. I did some odd bits
of part-time teaching after leaving Reading in 1988, but there was no
possibility of getting hired as a full-time lecturer again.
BG: Even if you'd
never done anything else, your output would seem prolific. How do you
produce so much?
BS: It's always seemed rather meagre
to me. Anthony Trollope pointed out in his autobiography that a part-time
writer working for three hours a day and spending the first half hour
of that time re-reading the previous day's work ought to be able to
produce 2,500 words a day six days a week, or 750,000 words a year.
Even as a supposedly full-time writer, working more than six hours a
day, it's only recently that I've managed to produce 750,000 words a
year on a regular basis, so I've always thought of myself as horribly
inefficient. Writers working in the commercial sector are restricted
by their publishers, of course, who don't like them to produce more
than one book a year; they have to spend the rest of their time doing
reviews, articles and the like, or idling around. I made some effort
to follow that policy when I was still publishing commercially--the
100 books don't account for much more than half of my 12.5 million word
total output--but it was always annoying.
BG: Samuel R Delany's
The Jewel-hinged Jaw names you in the context of a discussion
of the manner in which young SF writers of the 1960s were driven to
produce enormous quantities of sf by the editors of the day--he notes
that you had produced six books by the age of 24. Was that the formative
influence that got you into the habit of writing so voluminously?
BS: I think Chip Delany might have mistakenly
assumed that his own experience was more commonplace than it was. Because
he was an order of magnitude better than the other writers producing
halves of Ace doubles in the mid-1960s it's only natural that Don Wollheim
should have pressed him to produce as much work as possible. When I
started, a few years later, the work I was doing was below normal standards
of publishability, and the fact that Don bought it reflected the desperation
of his attempts to keep the line going. He never pressed me to produce
more.
Actually, the six books Chip mentions were all written before my 22nd
birthday, and the next few books I wrote failed to sell; things only
picked up again after an 18-month hiatus, when Don set up DAW books
and was so desperate to get it off the ground that he agreed to take
a book he'd rejected at Ace if I would write something new for him.
He agreed to take two books a year thereafter (books were shorter in
those days and paperback publishers would often take two a year rather
than the one that subsequently became standard), but he always seemed
mildly resentful of the fact that I persisted in writing additional
books that I tried--mostly unsuccessfully--to sell to other editors.
The fact that a lot of writers of the time seemed "driven"
to produce a lot of work reflected the level of advances paid to beginning
writers. At $1,500 a pop, you couldn't make much of a living by writing
two paperback originals a year, but you stood a slim chance of rising
above the poverty line if you wrote twice as many. Nowadays, of course,
when everything is ten times as expensive but advances at the bottom
end of the market are even less than $1,500, you can't make a living
from that kind of work no matter how many books you write, so there's
no such temptation.
BG: Your 100th book
is Science Fact and Fiction: An Encyclopedia, exploring the interaction
of the two fields. I can readily see how science fiction borrows and
develops from facts, but are there instances where fiction has influenced
scientific discovery or understanding?
BS: It's now called Science Fact
and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; the publisher changed my title
without consulting me, blithely disregarding the change of implication
and the fact that the term "science fiction" is used rather
narrowly within the text. The book attempts a moderately comprehensive
account of the way that the evolution of various branches of science
has been reflected in fiction and has stimulated the literary imagination.
The flow of influence in the other direction is much subtler, but literary
representations of scientific work and ambition have certainly influenced
the way that scientists are perceived by their fellows, and that has
influenced the way they see themselves. I've long been interested in
the fundamental interplay between the narrative of science and the science
of narrative--although that's not something that anyone else in the
world is interested in, so I had to sneak that kind of stuff into the
interstices of the package.
BG: Doesn't that qualify
as an academic book?
BS: No. It's a scholarly book, to some
degree, but now that academia is merely a qualifications industry, there's
very little scope left in contemporary academic writing for scholarship.
Like any modern reference-book, it has to be marketed to libraries,
and packaged in such a way as to attract the attention of the widest
possible range of librarians, so it's a rather chimerical text. One
of the advantages of an A-Z format, though, is that one can put together
a patchwork serving several simultaneous agendas, and that's what I
tried to do.
BG: I know from the
course you taught at Winchester that you're concerned with the propriety
of pessimistic story arcs, which undervalue the benefits of change and
technology. Do you see the pessimism of sf as a reflection of a society
at odds with change? Does sf reflect society or lead society in attitudes
of that sort?
BS: The problem arises as much from
the nature of melodrama as from any explicit fear of change. Stories
require things to go wrong in order that they can be put right again,
thus providing a basic pattern of challenge and climax and a satisfactory
sense of closure. Many writers do, of course, find the prospect of progress
innately threatening--it's difficult for anyone ever forty to adopt
any attitude to the future except terror or denial--but I'm more concerned
with the way that the very nature of fiction favours story-arcs that
afford a tacit privilege to the status quo, representing all innovation
as evil simply because that's the easy way to make a story gripping.
Morally responsible futuristic fiction--which, of course, excludes all
cinema and TV "sci-fi" and most printed sf--needs to find
a way of steering around that problem. I hope that sf mostly reflects
what's already inherent in society--it would be dreadful to think that
its by-products were inflicting significant harm.
BG: Where do you see
sf going in the future? Are there any challenges left now that writers
have used the ideas of time, space, different life forms, different
forms of society, space travel, biotechnology, ecology, future history
and so on?
BS: It's true that sf writers have introduced
all those ideas into fiction, but hardly anyone at the party is actually
engaging them in conversation yet. Insofar as such ideas are challenging,
the challenges remain largely unmet, save for a handful of writers swimming
against the tide of popular expectation and demand. A few of those have
managed to build up a cult following but none of them has made any significant
impact on a mass audience. The fraction of sf that belongs to popular
culture is essentially mindless--not merely stupid but sociopathic--while
the fraction that harbours serious thought is way out on the fringes
of unpopular culture. Hopefully, there will always be heroic writers
willing to work on that frontier, but as a marketing category, sf will
continue to go exactly where it's been headed since the term entered
common usage: nowhere.
BG: Who are the heroic
writers? Are you one of them?
BS: The most conspicuously and consistently
heroic, at present, include Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Bruce Sterling
and Gregory Benford--but there are many others who have struggled hard
to include serious elements in more commercially marketable texts, with
varying measures of success. I tried to do that, in my own idiosyncratic
fashion, but failed dismally.
BG: You've published
a hundred books.
BS: That would have qualified as an
achievement if I'd managed it twenty years ago, but nowadays it's just
an absurdity. It's ten years since I made a commercial sale in the UK,
and the renamed Science Fact and Fiction: An Encyclopedia seems
likely to be the last US volume that I actually get paid for. Nine out
of my last ten books, and all of the next ten in the pipeline, are print-on-demand
titles that will be fortunate to sell two dozen copies. I don't any
longer qualify as a professional writer.
BG: Hadn't you planned
a follow-up project to Science Fact and Fiction: An Encyclopedia?
BS: I submitted a proposal for a companion
volume on Folklore and Fantastic Literature, which would have
explored the ideative roots and evolution of modern fantasy fiction
in much the same way that SF&F explored those of sf. My editor
at Routledge loved it and five outside readers gave it the thumbs-up,
but before a contract could be issued Routledge's parent company, Informa,
abruptly closed down the Reference Books division. Printed reference
books are no longer commercially viable now that everyone looks things
up on the Internet, even though most publishers can get the work of
compilation done for next to nothing by academic hacks avid to accumulate
publication credits. It looks as if the entire market sector is now
effectively dead. The fact that Wikipedia is so easy to use easily outweighs
the disadvantages it carries in the forms of promiscuous misinformation
and malicious disinformation.
BG: Will you continue
to work as a writer if you aren't getting paid for anything you write?
BS: Probably. I'm well aware of the
ludicrousness of it, but there's nothing else I could do instead. I've
got sixteen waking hours a day to use up, just like everyone else, and
my eyesight is now so poor that reading has become something of a chore.
There's a certain freedom in not having to worry about making one's
work acceptable to a market-minded editor, although there's still the
necessity of shaping the work in such a way that someone might be willing
to publish it. In some ways, it's just as difficult to give work away
as it is to sell it. Getting the next hundred books into print will
be even more of a challenge than clocking up the first hundred, even
if I make no money out of them at all. On the other hand, I also have
the comfort of knowing that if I wake up one morning and decide that
I don't want to do it any more I can simply stop, without any significant
loss of income or anyone caring. That could happen when my current working
computer gives up the ghost--I might simply not bother to splash out
on a new one.
 BG:
Your fiction is very various. In short stories like those collected
in Designer Genes and the future history series of novels you
wrote for Tor you explore the future advancement of biotechnology. In
your Immanion Press books, The Curse of the Coral Bride and Sheena
and Other Gothic Tales, you work in an entirely different Decadent
vein. Your last commercial publication in the UK, the three-volume novel
comprising Serpent's Blood, Salamander's Fire and Chimera's
Cradle, starts out looking like a quasi-Medieval fantasy and ends
up as ecological science fiction. Two of your other recent novels, Kiss
the Goat and Streaking, are contemporary fantasies whose
fantasy component may be entirely delusional. Why such variety?
BS: It's the spice of life, so they
say. Trying out lots of different things prevents me from getting bogged
down in  preoccupation.
As with prolific production, it's another thing that commercial publishers
try hard to discourage--efficient marketability requires consistency
of product, so commercial editors always want their writers to stick
hard to the same subgenre, if not to repeat themselves endlessly--but
I've always been interested in an eccentric variety of concerns, whose
connections are rather tenuous if not entirely arbitrary. On the other
hand, the same philosophical themes do tend to crop up in all the works
you've cited: the difficulties of intellectual enquiry, of determining
what's true and what isn't in confrontation with confused evidence,
and of deciding what to do in circumstances where rational certainty
is unachievable. If I had any constant readers, they'd always be guaranteed
to find the same sorts of enigmas, addressed with the aid of the same
sense of humour, no matter how various the spatial and temporal settings
of the stories are.
BG: One of your more
frequent concerns seems to be vampirism. You won a British Science Fiction
Award--your only award for fiction--in 1995 for "The Hunger and
Ecstasy of Vampires", and The Empire of Fear was your most
successful novel. Why do you think vampires have attracted so much interest
in modern fantasy fiction? Is it that they operate outside the law,
subversively, or do they represent a stratum of society that feeds on
the rest of us, and of whose predatory activities we're acutely aware?
Or is it the metaphorical connotations of blood and contamination?
BS: It's certainly a theme I've addressed
on many occasions, mostly in search of new ways to import a little originality
into a theme that's been exceptionally well-worn. The Empire of Fear
arose out of the notion that the literary mythology of vampirism might
be fundamentally flawed in representing vampires as fugitives perpetually
in hiding. If there really were such things as vampires--which is to
say, if there really were a biology of vampirism--it seemed to me that
they would long ago have risen to the status of an aristocracy, albeit
an aristocracy that would come under threat when the possibility arose
of cultivating a scientific understanding of the relevant biology, so
I wrote an alternative history presenting that case.
Empire of Fear's original publisher made good money out of
the book--by selling subsidiary rights, not by selling actual copies---and
was very keen for me to do more. Initially the editor thought it would
be okay if my follow-up project involved werewolves instead, but when
that went badly her successor asked me to another vampire book, so I
did Young Blood--a contemporary fantasy featuring a very different
kind of vampire. Unfortunately, that was a sales disaster too. At one
point the editor, at the behest of the sales department, asked me to
think of an alternative title including the word "vampire",
and I came up with The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires--but they
didn't like that one either, so I used it on a short novel featuring
futuristic vampires, which I cut to novella length in desperation when
the longer version didn't sell. Many of my short stories addressing
the theme were written in response to requests from anthologists putting
together thematic anthologies, who came to me because I was now known
as a "vampire author"; that kept up the pressure encouraging
me to come up with new wrinkles.
BG: But you've also
taken a strong interest in the literary history of the idea, translating
many previously-untranslated French vampire stories--initially in your
Dedalus anthologies and more recently in volumes published by Black
Coat Press, including Paul Féval's Vampire City and The
Vampire Countess, and the title story of Villiers de l'Isle Adam's
The Vampire Soul and other Sardonic Tales.
BS: Yes, I have. I'm a confirmed antiquarian,
fascinated by the thankless task of tracing such ideas through literary
history, and comparing their use in different cultural circumstances.
I've always had a particular interest in French imaginative fiction,
which exerted a powerful attraction on me long before I learned enough
French to translate interesting works that no one else had bothered
to render into English--or works like "Claire Lenoir" (which
the publisher retitled The Vampire Soul in order to get the word
"vampire" in there), which had been so badly translated as
seriously to misrepresent their nature and quality.
BG: Are there other
beings lurking in obscure literary sources that might yet come to the
attention of modern writers and take hold of the public imagination
in the same way that the vampire did in the 1970s?
BS: Probably. Modern fantasy fiction
is, in essence, a genre built of recycling and transfiguring folkloristic
notions. Its practitioners are continually dusting off all manner of
obsolete ideas and trying to re-equip them for contemporary use. Werewolves,
fairies, angels, schools of wizardry and occult conspiracies have already
undergone various revisionist treatments, some of which have achieved
successes echoing or even exceeding that of seventies vampire fiction.
BG: How much has your
translation work influenced your own fantasy writing? Do you rework
and develop themes and ideas from such sources?
BS: Everything I read and do influences
what I write. I'm continually plundering every aspect of my experience
for story ideas, and it's always more convenient to transfigure other
literary sources than trying to rework the chaotic produce of real events
into narrative form. One of my ongoing projects, which is unlikely to
be finished before I die, is a sequel to one of my Féval translations,
John Devil, which I'm doing as a roman feuilleton in annual
episodes, in Black Coat Press's anthology series Tales of the Shadowmen.
It's an insanely eccentric thing to do, but it's fun.
 BG:
I'm absolutely staggered by the amount of work you produce.
Your recent reference works--The Historical Dictionary of Fantasy
Literature and The A-Z of Science Fiction as well
as Science Fact and Fiction-- are enormous undertakings. They
could only be produced by someone who knows the Science Fiction and
Fantasy genres thoroughly enough to write authoritatively and in depth.
How do you go about creating and writing them? Do you have a large library
to hand to refer to or do you need to search out substantial amounts
of material?
BS: Science Fact and Fiction is
the only one that's genuinely substantial, at 460,000 words--although
the publisher's imbecilic decision to add a 140,000-word index will
make to look far bigger than necessary, swelling it to more than 700
pages. The two historical dictionaries--the A-Z is just a paperback
reprint of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction--are
much smaller, although the fantasy volume, at 200,000 words, did incorporate
a good deal of original work, seen from a distinctive perspective. Unfortunately,
the latter volume was utterly ruined by the publisher's copy-editor,
who butchered my text and introduced hundreds of grammatical atrocities,
many of which rendered sentences into gibberish or altered their intended
meaning. I told the publishers not to issue it unless they included
a disclaimer explaining what had happened, but they ignored me. I had
hoped that Folklore and Fantastic Literature would enable me
to make amends by doing the job properly, but there's no prospect of
that now. Luckily, Scarecrow Press is right down at the bottom of the
reference book market and nobody actually uses its books, so the atrocity
will pass largely unnoticed.
Compiling books of that sort gets easier the more reference book work
you do; I've done a lot over the last thirty years. Since the mid-1980s
all the text I've written has accumulated on disk, so every time I start
a new assignment I can usually cut-and-paste enough stuff to give me
a secure foundation on which to build. I have to be careful to change
the wording to avoid copyright problems, but that usually happens naturally
because of the different slants that different books take on and the
gradual incorporation of new information into the old. I do have a good
primary reference collection--the legacy of the forty years I spent
haunting second-hand book shops before my eyesight gave out--and I sometimes
get free copies of the reference books I work on, so I've got a useful
secondary collection too.
BG: How long does
it take to create a dictionary of that size and complexity?
BS: The wordage for the two historical
dictionaries was built into my standard quota for the year (750,000),
but they took up more than their fair share of the time-allotment. The
fantasy volume probably soaked up seven months or so, Science Fact
and Fiction was even more demanding, taking up almost a whole year
on its own.
BG: Setting yourself
enormous word targets every year, and often exceeding them, must take
a huge amount of self-discipline. How many hours a day do you write,
and how much preparation do you do for fiction? How many drafts do you
need for your finished work?
BS: I find that I begin to flag at half
past four no matter what time I start work in the morning, so I generally
try to be at my desk by eight; I take half an hour off at midday to
have lunch. I try to do "preparation" work--research and planning--in
the evenings so as not to take too big a bite out of writing time, but
that isn't always possible. Different kinds of work require different
degrees of preparation--fiction is usually only troublesome when I'm
writing work set in the past (or in alternative pasts), which requires
me to bone up on the period. One of the reasons I found it so hard to
meet Trollope's quota is that I always do two drafts of everything--and
very often do continual running revisions now that I work on a word-processor,
so that the beginning of a book is likely to be worked over four or
five times as the middle and end evolve.
BG: You've received
a number of awards for your non-fiction, culminating in the Science
Fiction Research Association's Pilgrim Award for a lifetime achievement
in Science fiction criticism. You've published an enormous number of
critical essays and articles exploring the foundations and development
of literary science fiction and fantasy. How important do you think
ongoing debate and analysis is for your own work and for the whole genre?
BS: My critical work has had a very
considerable influence on the way I write fiction, and what I write
about. I think I'm a much better writer for having done so much critical
analysis, although I'm probably also a much more esoteric writer in
consequence. Writers vary a lot in that respect, though; some make a
point of never reading any critical analysis in case it affects the
spontaneity of their work. I think critical analysis and controversy
have worked to the advantage of sf as a genre, because the way sf plays
with ideas gives it an innate collaborative and creative dimension,
but that's not as obvious in fantasy--which is one reason why it generates
much less critical discourse, even though it's by far the more popular
genre.
BG: In much of your
work there seems to be an underlying sense of righteous anger at human
injustice, ignorance and oppression. Do you agree with Granny Weatherwax
(in Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum) that sin is 'when you treat
people as things'?
BS: I don't really do anger, righteous
or otherwise, but there's certainly a lot of black comedy in my works
which is regretful of the tendency that people have to mistreat one
another horribly. I wish I could be as optimistic as Granny Weatherwax,
but it seems to me that most people treat things far better than they
do other people--when they don't, it's because they're other people's
things.
BG: Your work often
contains sympathetically realised female characters. Is the ability
to imagine points of view very different from your own a skill that
has improved over the years as your writing has matured, or do you think
it's an intrinsic part of your personality?
BS: It's primarily an aspect of the
work's variety; I don't like to use the same kind of protagonist all
the time, so I've explored both sexes, all ages and a number of purely
hypothetical viewpoints. I suppose it's rare for male writers to employ
female viewpoints in first-person narratives, as I've done several times--but
I've noticed that my exploits of that sort have been conspicuously less
successful in selling or being reprinted than my other works, so I guess
that it does have a certain alienating effect on readers. I hope that
my skill has increased with practice, but it probably does have roots
in my own personality. I always wanted to be macho as well as deep,
but failed dismally--I was good on the theory but hopeless in the practicals.
BG: You mentioned
having ten more works "in the pipeline". Did you mean that
literally or was it just hyperbole?
BS: Actually, I do have ten more volumes
at various stages of the publishing pipeline at present, as well as
another half dozen volumes of fiction that are complete but uncontracted
and a couple more in progress on my word-processor.
I have three m ore
translations ready for publication by Black Coat Press: the second volume
of Paul Féval's Blackcoats series, The Invisible Weapon;
an anthology called News from the Moon and Other French Scientific
Romances; and Paul Féval fils' novel Felifax.
Black Coat will also publish my Paris-set novel The New Faust at
the Tragicomique. One of my old publishers, Borgo Press--which shut
up shop seven years ago with a couple of my books typeset but unissued--has
recently re-emerged as an imprint of Wildside Press; it will issue the
two aborted collections, Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays
and Space, Time and Infinity and Other Essays in the near future,
and has contracted four similar collections of previously-published
material: Heterocosms: Science Fiction in Context and Practice, Jaunting
on the Scoriac Tempests and Other Essays, Gothic Grotesques and
News of the Black Feast and Other Random Reviews.
By the end of this year I hope to have completed a volume of translations
of Paul Féval's supernatural tales based in Breton folklore,
and one more novel--a sequel to S. Fowler Wright's classic The World
Below, written at the behest of his literary executor. I also hope
to have made significant progress with a couple of other ongoing projects
that might eventually materialise in volume form if I'm very lucky.
I still manage to sell the occasional item of short fiction to US magazines
and anthologies, and I'm part-way through what I intend to be a four-part
series of alternative history novellas in Asimov's Science Fiction.
"The Plurality of Worlds" was in the August issue and "Dr
Muffet's Island" will follow in the near future. When all four
have been written--and, hopefully, sold--I'll attempt to market expanded
versions to book publishers. I'm also working on a series of ten short
stories that will eventually be incorporated into a portmanteau novel
called Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations, which I'll
hawk around in a similarly optimistic fashion once as many of the short
pieces as I manage to sell have appeared. I hope to complete my second
hundred volumes in far less time than it took to publish the first hundred--I
can probably write them by the time I turn seventy, but publishing them
might take a little longer....
BG: Thank you Brian,
an extraordinary career. You are held in very high regard by your ex-students,
and your insights, and uncanny ability to pick up on what is good, bad
and indifferent in our own writing is greatly appreciated. It's always
being commented on, and your words continue to live on with us, even
though we finished the course at least a year ago. Your fans and anyone
at all interested in SF and Fantasy will hope very much that you don't
wake up one morning and decide against further writing.
All the very best for the next 100 books.
Brian Stableford: The First Hundred Books
NOVELS
1. Cradle of the Sun (Ace 1969)
2. The Blind Worm (Ace 1970
3. The Days of Glory (Ace 1971)
4. In the Kingdom of the Beasts (Ace 1971)
5. Day of Wrath (Ace 1971)
6. To Challenge Chaos (DAW 1972)
7. Halcyon Drift (DAW 1972)
8. Rhapsody in Black (DAW 1973)
9. Promised Land (DAW 1974)
10. The Paradise Game (DAW 1974)
11. The Fenris Device (DAW 1974)
12. Swan Song (DAW 1975)
13. The Face of Heaven (Quartet 1976)
14. Man in a Cage (John Day 1976)
15. The Mind-Riders (DAW 1976)
16. The Florians (DAW 1976)
17. A Vision of Hell (in The Realms of Tartarus DAW 1977;
separate ed. Die Vergessene Hölle unter uns Goldmann 1979)
18. A Glimpse of Infinity (in The Realms of Tartarus
DAW 1977; separate ed. Zurück ins Licht Goldmann 1979)
19. Critical Threshold (DAW 1977)
20. Wildeblood's Empire (DAW 1977)
21. The City of the Sun (DAW 1978)
22. The Last Days of the Edge of the World (Hutchinson 1978)
23. Balance of Power (DAW 1979)
24. The Paradox of the Sets (DAW 1979)
25. The Walking Shadow (Fontana 1979)
26. Optiman (DAW 1980)
27. The Castaways of Tanagar (DAW 1981)
28. Journey to the Center (DAW 1982)
29. The Gates of Eden (DAW 1983)
30. The Empire of Fear (Simon & Schuster UK 1988)
31. Zaragoz (as Brian Craig; G. W. Books 1989)
32. Plague Daemon (as Brian Craig; G. W. Books 1990)
33. Invaders from the Centre (NEL 1990)
34. The Centre Cannot Hold (NEL 1990)
35. The Werewolves of London (Simon & Schuster UK 1990)
36. Storm Warriors (as Brian Craig; G. W. Books 1991)
37. The Angel of Pain (Simon & Schuster UK 1991)
38. Ghost Dancers (as Brian Craig; G. W. Books 1991)
39. Young Blood (Simon & Schuster UK 1992)
40. The Carnival of Destruction (Pocket 1994)
41. Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future (Borgo 1994)
42. Serpent's Blood (Legend 1995)
43. Salamander's Fire (Legend 1996)
44. Chimera's Cradle (Legend, 1997)
45. The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires (Mark Ziesing 1996)
46. Inherit the Earth (Tor 1998)
47. Architects of Emortality (Tor 1999)
48. The Fountains of Youth (Tor 2000)
49. The Wine of Dreams (as Brian Craig, Games Workshop 2000)
50. Year Zero (Sarob Press 2000)
51. The Cassandra Complex (Tor, 2001)
52. Pawns of Chaos (as Brian Craig, Games Workshop, 2001)
53. The Eleventh Hour (Cosmos, 2001)
54. Dark Ararat (Tor, 2002)
55. The Omega Expedition (Tor, 2002)
56. Curse of the Coral Bride (Immanion Press, 2005)
57. Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story (Prime,
2005)
58. The Stones of Camelot (Black Coat Press, 2006)
59. Streaking (PS Publishing, 2006)
STORY COLLECTIONS
1. Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution
(Simon & Schuster (U.K.) 1991)
2. Complications and Other Stories (Cosmos, 2003)
3. Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies (Cosmos, 2004)
4. Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution (Five Star,
2004)
5. The Wayward Muse (Black Coat Press, 2005)
6. Sheena and Other Gothic Tales (Immanion Press, 2006)
NON-FICTION
1. The Mysteries of Modern Science (Routledge & Kegan Paul
1977)
2. A Clash of Symbols; The Triumph of James Blish (Borgo 1979)
3. Masters of Science Fiction: Essays on Six Science Fiction Writers
(Borgo 1981; revised & expanded as Outside the Human Aquarium:
Masters of Science Fiction, Borgo 1995)
4. Future Man (Granada 1984)
5. The Third Millennium (in collaboration with David Langford;
Sidgwick & Jackson 1985)
6. Scientific Romance in Britain (Fourth Estate 1985)
7. The Sociology of Science Fiction (Borgo 1987)
8. The Way to Write Science Fiction (Elm Tree 1989)
9. Algebraic Fantasies and Realistic Romances: More Masters of Science
Fiction (Borgo 1995)
10. Opening Minds: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Borgo 1995)
11. Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction (Hodder & Stoughton
Teach Yourself Books 1997)
12. Yesterday's Bestsellers (Borgo 1998)
13. Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence
(Borgo 1998)
14. The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places (Simon & Schuster
1999)
15. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature (Scarecrow
Press, 2004)
16. Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (Scarecrow Press,
2005)
17. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia (Routledge,
2006)
ANTHOLOGIES
1. The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins) (ed. Dedalus
1990)
2. Tales of the Wandering Jew (ed. Dedalus 1991)
3. The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy (ed. Dedalus 1991)
4. The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence (Black Feast) (ed. Dedalus
1992)
5. The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales (ed. Dedalus 1992)
TRANSLATIONS
1. The Angels of Perversity by Rémy de Gourmont (as Francis
Amery, Dedalus 1992)
2. Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain (as Francis Amery, Dedalus
1994)
3. Vampire City by Paul Féval (Sarob Press 1999)
4. Knightshade by Paul Féval (Sarob Press 2001)
5. Lumen by Camille Flammarion (Wesleyan University Press, 2002)
6. Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker by Jean Lorrain (Tartarus
Press, 2002)
7. The Vampire Countess by Paul Féval (Black Coat Press,
2003)
8. The Vampire Soul and Other Sardonic Tales by the Comte de
Villiers de l'Isle Adam (Black Coat Press, 2004)
9. The Scaffold and Other Cruel Tales by the Comte de Villiers
de l'Isle Adam (Black Coat Press, 2004)
10. John Devil by Paul Féval (Black Coat Press, 2005)
11. The Wandering Jew's Daughter by Paul Féval (Black
Coat Press, 2005)
12. Salem Street by Paul Féval (Black Coat Press, 2005)
13. Revenants by Paul Féval (Black Coat Press, 2006)
[N59 + SS6 + NF17 + A5 + T13 = 100]
 
Order online using these
links and infinity plus will benefit:
...Sheena and other gothic tales from Amazon.com
/ Amazon.co.uk
... The Stones of Camelot from Amazon.com
/ Amazon.co.uk
... Streaking from Amazon.com
/ Amazon.co.uk
... Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia from Amazon.com
/ Amazon.co.uk
Elsewhere
in infinity plus:
Elsewhere on the web:
|
