The Whispering Swarm Read Online Free Page A

in wax stencils which were then carefully placed over the drum of a mimeograph machine. That was how we reproduced things in those days, before Xerox, before computers. The stencils were delicate things and needed to be used with special skill, particularly if you had pictures or display lettering on them. To make sure they had come out right, you held them up to the light. If the typewriter keys had cut cleanly through the wax, you were ok. Pictures could be delicate as paper lace.
    Jacob Egg, Mr Ackermann’s dwarfish friend, who ran an estate agent’s in Grays Inn Road, offered me free use of their big, modern Gestetner machine. ‘Remember who started you off when you get to be Lord Beaverbrook,’ he said. He was very indulgent, giving me free paper and stencils. I think he was a little fascinated by me and maybe wanted to be a writer himself. Mr Egg kept copies of all my fanzines—and there were quite a few—and years later would show them, carefully preserved in plastic folders, as from ‘before you were famous.’
    I called mine ‘amateur mags’ before I discovered they were known as fanzines. I didn’t know there were other fanzines being produced until I put an ad in a print version of Craigslist called Exchange and Mart, addressing ERB enthusiasts. SF fans wrote from all over the country and people they knew wrote from America and Europe.
    Suddenly, at sixteen, I was part of international science fiction ‘fandom’! I was invited to attend an informal meeting of fans which was held on Thursday nights at the Globe pub, Hatton Garden, about five minutes from where I was born. Almost everyone there produced or contributed to SF fanzines! I was astonished. I had never read a word of contemporary science fiction and precious little Verne and Wells and now, at sixteen but tall enough to pass for older, I stood holding my pint of bitter and chatting to the amiably posh John Wyndham, Arthur Clarke, with his benign intelligence and strange Somerset-American accent, C.S. Lewis, all benign Oxbridge behind his good-humoured pipe, and a bunch of others whose work, like theirs, I had hardly heard of. My heroes were at that time Firbank, Aldous Huxley, T.H. White and Mervyn Peake. I had a correspondence with White and would visit Peake later that year, as I would Tolkien, with Lewis’s help. Perhaps they liked me because I was enthusiastic but didn’t fawn. Before he died, Wyndham said they were all in awe of me, though I was so young, because of my energetic dynamism. I can only guess what he meant.
    I was soon on first name terms with the SF editors, too: Ted Carnell of New Worlds and Science Fantasy, dapper in his fashionable casuals, with a Ronald Colman moustache; rangy, six-foot-three-inch raconteur Ted Tubb of Authentic and bookish little Peter Hamilton of Nebula with his heavy Scots accent. Useful contacts? It didn’t necessarily pay to know them. Barry Bayley got on well with them all but took years before he sold to Carnell and that was by changing his name. More useful contacts for me in those days were the Fleet Street newspapermen like Peter Phillips or John Burke, who knew when a bit of quick copy was needed. I remained a working journalist for years before I saw myself specifically as a fantasy writer.
    At the Globe I became close friends with Barry, Pete Taylor and John Brunner, all recently demobbed from the RAF. Brunner, I think, had been an officer. In those days young men inducted into the national service were, if reasonably intelligent and technically savvy, sent to the RAF to be trained as wireless operators or electrical engineers. The theory was that you came out with a skill. Sadly, the only skill we all shared was the one they’d gone in with, as writers. Barry, the spitting image of Voltaire and not much above five feet high, was a clerk at Australia House and all brain. That twin of the great French comedian Fernandel, Pete Taylor, like