A
(Arthur) Bertram Chandler was born in Aldershot, England in 1912, Chandler sailed
the world in every-thing from tramp steamers to troop transports before emigrating
to Australia in 1956. Here he commanded merchant vessels under the Australian and
New Zealand Flags up to his retirement in 1974.
Up until his death in 1984 he published over 40 science fiction novels and over
200 works of short fiction writing as A Bertram Chandler, George Whitley or Andrew
Dunstan. Many of the novels had a nautical theme, with the plot moved from the seas
of earth to the ships of space in the future. Many of the stories revolved around
the character of John Grimes some times referred to as “Hornblower of Space”. While
most stories are set in the future, they also have a distinctly “Australian” theme
with places and stories relating back to Australia today.
Chandler was the last master of the aircraft carrier Melbourne. Law required it
to have a master aboard for the months while it was laid up and waiting to be towed
off to Asia to be broken up for scrap, so in a sense he really was briefly the master
of the Australian navy's former flagship. Apparently he had his typewriter aboard,
and worked on his novels!
Chandler received four Australian SF Achievement Award "Ditmars" for his
novels. Nearly all of his novels were published in the USA. Two of his short stories
'The Cage' and 'Giant Killer’ are regarded as some of the best SF stories
written in the 1950's. He was also very popular in Japan winning the prestigious
SEIUN SHO, the premier Science Fiction award. The Japanese editions have some of
the best covers of any of the published editions.
To the Galactic Rim
Baen Books will be releasing
To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga
as a trade paperback on March 1 2011. You can preorder now from Amazon.
This includes the first four John Grimes books,
The Road To the Rim,
To Prime the Pump,
The Hard Way Up and
The Broken Cycle.
A lovely dollop of trollop
Frank Weissenborn has published an article on A Bertram Chandler in the fanzine
Steam Engine Time (March
2010). Check it out!
Listening to him, he was very much our shipmate and friend. And throughout, he stayed
true to the sea. It was a matter of respect. And of honour. And keeping the shine
on the klaxon. And at playing the host, he was very much the captain at the dinner
table. We had the pleasure of an enjoyable evening in his company — only the men
in the lounge and the women in the bed, please. We only have to remember how he
would welcome us on board, ‘Come in, this is liberty hall; you can piss on the mat
and call the cat a bastard.’ — Frank Weissenborn, 2009
Missing Chandler Story Published
A
new John Grimes story has finally been published more than 24 years after A Bertram
Chandler's death. The story is called
Grimes and the Gaijin Daimyo and
is part of the Kitty Kelly series. It is part of a new Australian Anthology called
Dreaming Again edited by Jack Dann and is a follow up to Jack Dann and
Janeen Webb's successful
Dreaming Down Under anthology. The book
has been published by Harper Voyager in Australia and and should be available in
all good bookshops as from July 2008. Dreaming Again has now be published
in the USA and Amazon has stock available using the following link
Dreaming Again: Thirty-five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian
Fiction
)
Thanks to Paul Collins for making the story available more than 30 years after he
purchased it.
Letter
This letter was published in Philosophical Gas (March 1975).
Your letter of January 30 is to hand, also the batch of minizines (NMH 12, 13; FD). And what’s all the flap about? In this case I was the writer, you the reviewer. What you reviewed you didn’t like, and you said so - as have we all from time to time. The fact that you’re a personal friend of the writer – has nothing to do with it. And your review wasn’t a patch on the one in Nation Review. That was a real stinker, Oddly enough, though, you praise THE BITTER PILL for the very part of it that was slightly condemned by Ken Longworth in the Newcastle Morning Herald. He reckoned that the maritime sequences were ‘too heavily technical’.
In any case, I’m flattered that you mention me in the same breath as Len Deighton, who is one of my own favourites. Deighton, as you know, made two comparatively recent attempts to break out of his own secret-agent infested ghetto, with ONLY WHEN I LARF and BOMBER. Susan, who doesn’t much care for the real Deighton, thought ONLY WHEN I LARF excellent and found BOMBER unreadable. I found ONLY WHEN I LARF only so-so, and deemed BOMBER a great novel. As it says somewhere in the Bible, ‘One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian.’
(Have you ever considered writing Keats & Chapman anecdotes, Bert?)
Also I love Flashman, although Susan doesn’t much care for him, (Flashman is mentioned in Farmer’s TARZAN ALIVE. Although Mr Farmer does not make the claim, I think that be, like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes et al, must have been descended from the group exposed to that dose of mutagenic radiation. Although no hero he displays a fantastic talent for survival.) Anyhow, George MacDonald Fraser made a brief foray out of his private ghetto with THE STEEL BONNETS, a very well researched history of the Border Rievers, petty gang leaders who infested the border between England and Scotland prior to the Act of Union. None of them had the glamour of a Ned Kelly.
When I read Fraser’s book I had been trying to get BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE from all three of the public libraries to which I belong - Launceston, Hobart and Woollahra, (Ultimately I was knee-deep in Wounded Knees, but that’s another story.) On one visit to Hobart I found in the library a book covering the same period of American history -Stephen Longstreet’s WAR CRIES ON HORSEBACK. At the same time I rook out Fraser’s STEEL BONNETS, and I had with me all three Issues of Playboy with the serialized FLASH-MAN AT THE CHARGE. Neither as a historian nor as a writer is Mr Longstreet a patch on Mr Fraser, but his WAR CRIES ON HORSEBACK abounded In larger-than-life real-life characters: Lieutenant Colonel Custer, Chief Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph and many more. THE STEEL BONNETS, however, was no more than the chronicles of the dreary doings of petty gangsters. I put the book down half read - I never finished it - and turned with a sigh of relief to the latest installment of the Flashman history.
It boils down to this: As a writer you haven’t a hope in heft of pleasing all of the people all of the time, or even some of the people all of the time. The best you can hope for is to please some of the people some of the time.
At the moment, in my own case, ‘some of the people’ now includes the Japanese. A publishing house in Tokyo is going to reprint all the Rim Worlds and Grimes novels. One Interesting point that has come up is that regarding illustrations - both dust jacket and internal. When I first started as a contributor to the American sf pulps it used to be said, with some justification, that the average magazine artist has a mental age of six and can’t read. Mind you, there are some good artists. When most of the Grimes novelettes were being published in If I used to love Vaughn Bode’s pics, especially when ships were involved. Nonetheless, book and magazine publishers in the Western World do tend to give their artists a free hand, very often with disastrous results. One novel recently had a picture of the central character, a Royal Navy Captain, on the dust Jacket. He was in uniform. His cap badge wasn’t quite right. but the biggest gaffe was depicting him with a neat moustache - even after the writer had specifically pointed out that in the Royal Navy, as far as facial hair is concerned, you either wear a ‘full set’ or go clean-shaven.
The Japanese, however, don’t leave everything to the artist. In their Innocence they assume that writers know what they’re writing about. Can you imagine me answering a long-distance telephone call from Tokyo, trying to explain to a rather giggly Nipponese maiden what the Mannschenn Drive looks like? No kidding. We got all sorts of pseudo-technicalities more or less ironed out and I said goodnight and hung up. Then the telephone rang again. It was the same wench. ‘Can you tell me, please, what is the Survey Service cap badge?’ Oddly enough, I have the details of Rim Runners’ uniform trimmings quite firmly fixed in my mind - the main part of the badge is, of course, the winged wheel - but l bad to invent something for the Survey Service (a winged star, I decided) on the spur of the moment.
Bert concludes by mentioning that he has been prematurely retired from his job as ship’s master because ANL - no, I’m wrong: USS, isn’t it (oh hell) - has retired two of its older ships. He hastens to assure me that his retrenchment is on full pay - and that we might very well see him In Canberra some time. I look forward to that. Bert Chandler is one of my favourite people. (And judging by the letters I get, one of yours, too.) - John Bangsund