The Rediscovery of Michael G Coney

Posted by Colin Harvey Aug 1, 2008

There was a time in 1975, when I was fourteen, that Michael G. Coney seemed to be everywhere. In the space of a few months, I read Winter's Children, the story of aliens on a freezing planet; The Hero of Downaways, shrunken people battling giant gophers, according to the cover; The then almost unpronounceable Syzygy, with it's story of six moons and a giant tide; Mirror Image, about metamorphic aliens; and most memorable, Hello Summer, Goodbye, with it's seaside fishing village and adolescent lovers.

Even at fourteen, I could recognize that these weren't particularly alien planets. They were enough like home that Coney's colonies and alien worlds were comfortingly familiar, but strange enough for my taste in aliens to be satisfied.

Then Coney was gone, like the tide in his novels.

Fast-forward thirty years, and the news that John Clute has written an obituary for Michael G. Coney, yet there was no mention of it on the SFWA website; a mere ten years after he'd placed on the final Nebula Ballot for Best Novelette, Coney was gone, and distressingly, no one even seemed to know.

There can be fewer reminders to any aspiring author of how ephemeral publishing, and even fame can be. Had he been American, and perhaps closer to the SFWA's decision-makers, Coney might well have been Author Emeritus material.

Instead of which his books were out of print, and no one seemed to care.

Peter Crowther is a publisher with an astute eye, and a long-time lover of the speculative genre. Now PS Publishing has reissued Coney's most famous book, Hello Summer Goodbye (known in the US as Rax) and it's previously unpublished (at least commercially) sequel, I Remember Pallahaxi.

You can read the review here, and learn more about this much under-rated writer.