Happening to mention to an old friend recently that I had
once won a prize in a short story competition, I fell into the inevitable
elephant trap. “Can we read it?” he asked. “Why not republish it?” So, with
heavy heart, I dug the magazine out of a tattered box and read the story for
the first time in thirty-five years. I found a self-conscious cleverness about
it which now embarrasses me, but I could see below the flashiness there was a certain
stylistic flair of a type that gets you noticed. It evidently got the attention
of revered sci-fi author and all-round good egg Brian
Aldiss, who judged the competition.
Despite Aldiss’s flattering description of me as “discerningly
hip”, the story now seems like a relic of Cold War paranoia, of a time when
Mutual Assured Destruction promised to wipe us all out, leaving only a few remaining
idealists to eke out an existence on some Pacific islet.
The jokes come from spending too much time in a “writers’
workshop” group at Oxford, where I grew to relish the sound of laughter when I
read my efforts before an audience.
The story first appeared in Isis in December 1977. Turning to the back cover, I’m reminded that
the editor at the time was a pushy young man called Mark
Thompson; I believe he later joined the BBC.
Enough with the throat-clearing. For what(ever) it’s worth,
here it is. (Click on frames to enlarge.)
