Neptune's Cauldron

Neptune's Cauldron _ Michael G Coney

Michael Coney, who has died in British Columbia aged 73, established himself in the mid-1970s as one of the leading British science-fiction writers of his day, with a string of novels distinctive for their combination of light readability on the surface and much darker inner depths.
He was born in Britain, but was already an expatriate on the West Indian island of Antigua by the time his first short story was published. This appeared in 1969, in the now-defunct SF magazine, Vision of Tomorrow. Several more stories followed in both British and American publications. Most of these were anthologised, and Coney's first collection of his own short work appeared soon afterwards.

But it was not until his first novels were published that Coney made a real impact on his readers. The ones that made a particular impression were Mirror Image (1972), Winter's Children (1974) and Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975), though all his books at this time did well, both critically and among the readership. During this period, Coney was managing an Antiguan hotel called the Jabberwock, a beachfront nightclub with a few guest rooms. He had left Britain in 1969, after the sort of disengaged career attempts that characterised the early years of so many writers.