Coney’s Islands

In a writing life stretching over thirty years, Michael G. Coney wrote nineteen science fiction novels and a single collection of short stories. Although his novels combined accessibility with fine storytelling and superb characterization, they never reached the audience they deserved. Since his death in 2005, other than the publication of two novels in small press limited editions, his work has remained out of print in Britain.

Born in Birmingham in 1932, Coney trained as an accountant and worked for firms of chartered accountants in Birmingham, Dorset and Devon, and in the Sixties ran a public house in Devon. In 1969 he moved to Antigua to run the Jabberwock Beach Hotel, and in 1972 took a post with the British Columbia Forestry Service, living in Sidney, Vancouver Island. Remarkably for a writer of twenty books and over sixty short stories, he never wrote full-time, instead fitting in his writing around his profession and family. I first came across Coney’s work in 1985 when I read his short story ‘The True Worth of Ruth Villiers’ in John Carnell’s New Writings in SF 17, and a few weeks later ‘Bartholomew & Son (and the Fish-Girl)’ in Issue 27 of the same series. The stories made a big impact on me. The former was set in the near future, in a well-realized southern England coastal locale, and featured a first-person narrator and a single science fiction idea from which Coney had extrapolated a society changed by that idea: that an individual’s worth could be estimated by a harsh points system of social credit. The latter tale was part of a series of futuristic stories and novellas set on the ‘Peninsula’, a strip of land separated from the body of mainland America after a devastating tsunami, featuring artists and their creations, mood-affecting ‘emotion mobiles’. What I liked about both stories, quite apart from Coney’s expert handling of narrative and plot, was that they were principally about people, and how a few small changes in society had an effect on character. Coney wasn’t so much interested in the science behind the stories, or the mechanics of the technology, but in how science and technology affect individual human beings, and how he could combine new ideas and interesting characters to tell compelling stories full of incident and narrative twists. Over the next few years I read and reread most of Coney’s novels and all but a handful of his short stories. Among his early novels, Syzygy and Brontomek! stand out – the latter won the British Science Fiction Association award for the best novel of 1976. Both are first-person narratives set in the colony world of Arcadia, featuring a cast of believable, likeable characters. In Brontomek! especially, Coney achieved a total synthesis of character and narrative, producing a fast-paced, entertaining novel about people with whom the reader could identify in a story that gripped and constantly surprised. The Girl with a Symphony in Her Fingers brought the Peninsula stories together in a skilful mosaic novel that tells the story of Joe Sagar who farms alien creatures, slithes, for their skins, and his dealings with a series of fascinating locals: the spiteful and neurotic holovision-movie star Carioca Jones, the bonded slave girl Joanne, the snobbish and bigoted Miss Marjoribanks. Through reading Coney’s novels and short stories, I felt I was coming to know the man. Perhaps at the risk of mistakenly identifying the author with his creations, I saw Coney as a compassionate chronicler of human foibles, able to write with equal facility of young love and aged cynicism (he also did a fine line in bombastic and bumptious older characters in positions of authority). He came across as humane, open-minded and humorous. In the early Nineties we began exchanging letters, and a few years later, when we both had e-mail, I suggested collaborating on a short story. The first idea I sent him was half-baked. Coney made some radical suggestions, improving the premise of the story and adding ideas of his own. Slowly, over a period of weeks, we developed the outline of the story, then characters and a setting – a coastal outpost on a colony world. Throughout the process I was learning something about the art of story-telling, and about Coney the writer. He was a perfectionist and a consummate craftsman. In one e-mail he told me that what mattered to him in the initial stages of a story was not the actual writing of it, the words, but being able to envisage the story’s shape in his head. This resonated with me. One of the delights of reading a Coney story or novel – perhaps on the second reading, having been dragged along helter-skelter through the first – is the appreciation of the story’s shape and balance, the way all the parts fit together like a precision-tooled machine. From the collaboration I came to understand how, in a Coney story, clues dropped in the first few pages are picked up and expanded upon later; how nothing is wasted, and how anything unnecessary is ruthlessly cut. Coney was a great believer in Chekhov’s dictum that a pistol introduced in the first act should be used by the third. The collaboration also showed me what a thoroughly pleasant man Michael Coney was. More than once he suggested that, as I had come up with the original idea, my name should come before his on the by-line. He was full of praise for my ideas and characteristically modest about his own talents. I emerged from the experience with plans and ideas for further joint stories. We batted a few ideas back and forth, but other projects got in the way. I look back now and regret the fact. Our sole collaboration, ‘The Trees of Terpsichore Three’, was published in Spectrum 8, May 2002. It proved to be the last piece of short fiction by Michael Coney to be published. He died, after a short illness, in November 2005.

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I came across Coney’s finest novel, Hello Summer, Goodbye, after reading all of his others. I had inadvertently saved the best till last. Hello Summer, Goodbye, first published in 1975, tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world. They are not human, but stilk, a humanoid race. In a short prefatory note to the novel Coney explained: ‘I have assumed my aliens to be humanoid and, being humanoid, to be subject to human emotions and frailties. I have assumed their civilization to be at the stage of development approximate to our year 1875 . . .’ The planet undergoes long periods of summer, and a gruelling winter lasting some forty years, and is made real by some brilliant world building: the tidal effect of the ‘grume’, a spectacular thickening of the sea water; ice-devils who inhabit tidal pools and have the ability to freeze the water when prey enter it; and the lorin, the peace-loving, furry humanoid co-habitees of the planet, with whom the destiny of the stilk is mysteriously bound. To quote Coney’s introduction again: ‘This is a love story, and a war story, and a science-fiction story, and more besides.’ It is also Coney’s finest intermeshing of character, incident and event – a sensitive account of growing up and the experience of first love, with one of the finest endings with a twist in modern science fiction. Coney wrote a sequel – I Remember Pallahaxi – but it remained unpublished during his lifetime, coming out in a limited edition a couple of years after his death. It was written years after Hello Summer, Goodbye, and marketed at a time when Coney’s work was not finding the audience it deserved. Why his writing was never more popular is a question I often ask myself. He wrote satisfying, entertaining stories about real human beings, full of great ideas, excellent plots and neat resolutions. What he didn’t write, perhaps, provides the reason he failed to make it on to the best-seller list. Coney eschewed sensationalism; his novels were not action-adventure or militaristic, nor were they filled with gratuitous sex or violence. He didn’t write hard-core science fiction, but instead quiet novels in which the emotions of his characters were paramount. His novels are that rarity: fine science fiction which can be appreciated and enjoyed by the science fiction aficionado and the general reader alike.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Eric Brown 2011