I was also treated to listening to radio plays back then: there was the Lone Ranger, Terry and the Pirates and my favorite – The Shadow! Although not SF, I think that listening to these shows taught me to use the movie screen inside my head. This may be why I am so often disappointed with the special effects laden SF offerings found on the screen today.

During that same period of time, the Mr. Softee Ice Cream company (which was, in my opinion, better than Good Humor because they sold soft ice cream cones) was giving away premiums, one of which was a set of collecting cards featuring the adventures of Captain Chapel and his trip to the moon.

I only ever received one of these cards directly from the ice cream truck – and it held my fascination for hours. I recently acquired the entire Captain Chapel card set (ten in all) and am amazed at the quality of the images.

Of course there were other television shows during this time that fueled my SF fire; Lost in Space (there was one monster on that show, a shaggy, mummy-like creature, that scared me so badly that for years afterwards my closet door had to be closed before I could go to sleep), which of course was a terrible show, but in the mind of a 6, 7 or 8 year old, the powers of discrimination are fortunately virtually non-existent.

There was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Kowalski! Kowalski!): I believe I was 7 when that show first appeared and it was on after my bedtime. I must have argued a good case for staying up to watch it, because my most dreaded punishment of those days was having to go to bed at my usual time on Voyage night.

There was Time Tunnel (the show had my friends and I jumping from one historical period to another)… and Land of the Giants, which we ‘played’ by the simple expedient of pretending that all adults were ‘giants’ and, of course, there was Star Trek.

Star Trek, firmly entrenched in adult prime time during its original run, was on too late for me to stay up and watch. Fortunately, my father watched it often enough that I could sneak down the stairs and watch over his shoulder from the stair landing. (I had to watch Dad pretty closely, since you never knew when he might get up for a snack…) When the show went into re-runs, the entire family had to push dinnertime back to 7 pm so I could watch. (My little brother’s primary activity during these days was developing ever more elaborate schemes to disturb my viewing pleasure…)

I was, of course, going to school during this time and, like most other kids of my generation, purchasing books from the Scholastic Book Company. I purchased The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey and just about anything else they offered involving space, robots or kids on other planets. (I found out many years later from Lester himself that he hadn’t actually written it. For some (ungodly) reason I traded my copy in and, years later, I went to interview Mr. Del Rey at an SF bookshop in Philadelphia. I forgot to bring the books I wanted him to sign with me, so I looked through the store’s bins of used books and found The Runaway Robot. It turned out to be my personal copy, with my 8 year old signature inside the front cover. Despite his lack of authorship, Lester graciously agreed to sign it after hearing the story of its travels).

Once I hit the fourth grade, my parents decided that it was time for me to learn a little something about money and a little something about buying my own books. The BOOKMOBILE was coming and, armed with all of four dollars, I anxiously prowled the dark and mysterious interior of the van-cum-library parked behind the school.

I managed to escape intact, but those four dollar bills were not so lucky. They’d been spent on Magnum Easy Eye editions of:

Frankenstein – Mary Shelly
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
The Invisible Man – HG Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau – HG Wells
The Time Machine – HG Wells
War of the Worlds – HG Wells
Starman Jones – Robert A Heinlein

That cover fascinated me so much that I saved Starman Jones to the last. It was enough just to look at the cover and I’d be off to all kinds of imagined worlds.

Needless to say, once I had read Starman Jones, there was no going back. I saved every penny of my allowance, my lunch money and my occasional yard work pay to buy more Heinlein stories. After having read Wells, Verne, Shelly and Stoker (all of which I liked) I was convinced that Heinlein was the only person who wrote THAT kind of story. Fortunately for me, the man himself was in the middle of his production period and very popular with the bookstores.

My local bookstore was fairly easy to get to and, at least initially, well stocked with Heinlein. Whenever I had accumulated enough cash to afford another book, I’d beg a ride or, failing that, hop onto my trusty 3-speed stingray bike and travel the back roads to the mall. Please note that we’re talking astronomical sums here. Books went from 25 cents to 1.25 cents during this time period and it was all I could do to keep up with inflation.

Inevitably there arrived a day that brought with it the discovery that there were no new Heinlein titles on the shelves. My searches were in vain. Every title visible was one I already had. Every title listed in the back of the books was one I already had. Every title I had ever seen anywhere was one I already had.

For a brief moment, I considered that my career as a reader might be over. But then I remembered that Bookmobile guy. The guy who wanted to stifle my early interest in Heinlein, the man who wanted to deny me starships, alien planets, time travel, atomic death rays, a man who probably spent his every waking hour figuring out new and tortuous ways of destroying the nascent creativity and imagination in the little child-minds that came before him every day. I remembered that bastard and boy was he going to get it!

I started my attack subtley. I found a book store clerk and asked if maybe they didn’t have any more Heinlien hiding somewhere in the back of the store. The store clerk must have been taken by me and my precocious interest in such adult fare. (I was reading at an extremely advanced level at the time. So much so that when it came time for reading lessons in school, all I had to do was bring the latest book I was working on with me and sit quietly in the corner.) She asked why I was so interested in Heinlien and I explained to this nice lady that I had already read everything by Heinlein and was looking for something that was the same.

She took me back over to the science fiction section (it was not until that moment that I realized that Heinlein was in a special section!) and, following a brief discussion of what I liked about Heinlein (she read him too!) she picked out two books for me – Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and an Ace Double with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Door Through Space on one side and (here comes the Chandler tie-in) A. Bertram Chandler’s Rendezvous on a Lost World on the other.

I’ll never know what it was about those books that made her think they were suitable sequels to Time for the Stars, Starship Troopers, Space Cadet and et al, but they worked for me. I ended up reading the Chandler last of all and it was well worth the wait. The cover (oh yes, once again, the cover) depicted a strange looking space craft landing on an even stranger looking world. The title complimented the illustration perfectly. ‘Lost World’. Man, you could find just about anything on a lost world! Forget lost cities and lands that time forgot – this was a WHOLE PLANET!

That pretty much sums up HOW I BECAME A SCIENCE FICTION FAN. Its now nearly four decades later and I’m still reading that stuff. My origins as a fan don’t inform on just how immersed I became. A quote from my brother may serve to convey some small sense of just how infatuated and fanatical I had become: “science fiction, science fiction, science fiction, that’s all you ever talk about!.” He continually shortened and refined this epithet over the years such that eventually all he had to do was mutter ‘science fiction’ and shake his head to get the point across.

Nothing previously said details my involvement with collecting science fiction (I have over 3,000 volumes in the personal collection, many, many Volume one, Number one Science Fiction pulp magazines – about 63% of all the English language SF & Fantasy pulps) a huge collection of SF anthologies (including first printings of the three books considered to be the ‘first’ SF anthologies), nor does it relate my fannish activities (running a Hugo Banquet at the 1977 Worldcon, publishing fanzines, taking cross-country trips with other fen, being declared both a SMOF and a non-existent person at the same convention) or the review work I did of SF films for my college paper (I got to attend the premieres of Star Wars, Close Encounters, Logan’s Run, and several others), nor my historical research (based at least on the letter column in Amazing Stories magazine I’m somewhat of an amateur SF historian) nor the SF games I developed during the 80’s.

Nor does it explain what’s up with A. Bertram Chandler. I know its been the long way around. Everything that I just told you plays its part in what’s coming next. You’ve made it this far and the worst you'll encounter is yet more personal history in glorious boring detail, so why not just relax to the inevitable and finish it off?

As was mentioned earlier, I happened upon A. Bertram Chandler as a third-choice replacement for Heinlein. (NOT a ranking of importance or enjoyment, but simple sequential circumstance.) Now, mind you that this was at a time when my only experience with science fiction literature was a few of the classics (Wells, Verne), a couple of scholastic book selections (Del Rey and Keyes) and the aforementioned Grand Master.

This was well before I had learned anything about science fiction. All I knew was that it was the thing that made the lights inside my head go off. Man had just landed on the Moon. What I was reading was the next logical step. Lunar Lem to the Asgard. I’ll vacation with the saurians on Venus and next month ride a Torch Ship to one of the new colonies – or maybe step through a gate and homestead a new planet… When I grow up, I’ll be an astronaut and work on Mars…

I certainly didn’t know that science fiction was so complicated. I’d yet to hear the expression ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. I had no idea that there was a Golden Age. I didn’t know that there was as yet not a single universally accepted definition for the genre. I didn’t know the word genre! The New Wave was cresting and I’d never seen the old wave. (Fortunately I didn’t know at the time that we’d stop going to the Moon in a few short months.)

Once I began attending science fiction conventions and discoursing with my more learned brethren (I attended my first convention at the age of 13, Philcon at the ill-fated Mayflower Hotel, home of Legionaires Disease) I quickly found out that while R.A.H. was very highly regarded, as was LeGuin, (with RAH considered to be almost on a par with Verne and Wells - his ‘Grandmaster’ title was only just beginning to be used on a regular basis) Captain Mr. Chandler was considered a bit of a space opera hack. (Bradley was considered a bit of a novelty for being a woman – as was LeGuin – but this was before Marion’s career produced The Mists of Avalon and if anything, her work at the time was also regarded as nearly as space operatic as Chandler’s was).

This genuinely surprised me. After all, I enjoyed the Chandler stories just as much as the Heinlein stories. They were different, but just as good.

However, the fannish gods that reigned over this pre-commercial connish world had decreed that ‘serious science fiction with hard science and strong social messages’ was GOOD science fiction and anything that hearkened back to the days of blasters and metal brassieres was BAD science fiction. It was the kind of scifi that the entire mundane world pointed to when they wanted to make fun of us. (This was the era of SF fandom that refused to accept ‘scifi’ as an appellation; even whispering the word would get you beat about the head and shoulders with a hardback copy of Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron by a member of the Dorsai Irregulars.)

Unfortunately for me, I had chosen to like a writer who was NOT COOL.

Although I continued to read Chandler’s works whenever I could find them (mostly at the used book store), I did so with a guilty pleasure. I couldn’t let any of my fannish friends know that I actually liked a ‘bad’ writer.

A few years later, several local fans and I formed a science fiction club (PSFS if you must know – the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, entirely separate from the decades old club that runs the Philcons – and despite the fact that most of the members hailed from Cherry Hill New Jersey. I think we decided against NJSFS because there was just no way to pronounce the acronym). One of the other members (I’ll not reveal his name just in case he’s still embarrassed by his admission) also liked Chandler and our club discussed both Heinlein and Chandler , sometimes even in the same sentence (or, to be more historically accurate, in the same paragraphs and monologues).

It was this experience that really taught me that fandom and science fiction are what you make them, not the other way around. I was no longer ashamed to admit that I liked A. Bertram Chandler’s stories. Other people, and obviously at least one other fan, did too – otherwise, what was happening to all of the copies of his books that I wasn’t buying?

(I think it was about this time that I was horrified to learn what did happen to those remaindered books. They ground them up for pulp! And to think that, like myself, there were probably thousands of readers who would have gladly given a home to those poor, orphaned and condemned books…)

I’ll take a moment to give you a capsule review of Chandler’s works so that you aren’t misled into believing that I bought into the negative reviews in any fashion (as well as to illustrate, briefly, just how wrong that impression was).

To begin – Chandler was sufficiently avante garde for Harlan Ellison to have commissioned a story from him for The Last Dangerous Visions. (Its yet to see print and the story of LDV is a novel unto itself. I have contacted Mr. Ellison in an attempt to free the story from its bondage, to no avail. ((Harlan was nice on the phone, but turned away my every effort and proposal. He claims to not know the subject matter of the story – entitled True Believers – which I find hard to believe. More than likely he is determined that not one iota of that story will surface until the day LDV hits the racks. If you must know, I offered to pay for an entire non-existent copy of LDV, no strings attached, for the sole privilege of being able to read over the story and take notes. This offer I made in all seriousness, knowing how Harlan feels about rights and royalties. I offered to return any copies and even to sign a non-disclosure agreement, all of which shattered against the stony wall of Ellison’s refusal. Of course he is entirely within his rights to do what he did, as I am within my rights when I continue to try and find ways to get ahold of that story.))

Chandler’s early work was snatched up and encouraged by none other than John W. Campbell Jr. – the ‘father of the golden age of science fiction’. (This was in 1944, smack dab in the middle of Campbell’s discovery and development of other stellar lights in the science fiction galaxy – Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein…) Obviously, at least in Campbell’s mind, Chandler’s work was most definitely NOT the old swashbuckling, galaxy-destroying sci-fi that the esteemed editor had rejected.

The readers of the time responded in kind. At least one fan notes that Chandler’s stories routinely ranked 2nd and 3rd in the reader’s response section of Astounding/Analog magazine. A recent internet find reveals that Chandler was well-liked enough by the readers of Astounding and Analog to have garnered a place among the top 50 writers who’s works were ranked by the magazine’s reader survey section. That’s a top 50 writers ranking for those who have appeared in the magazine from Campbell’s advent until 2002!

Chandler’s themes were of a cutting-edge variety also. His early work is summed up in the classic Giant Killer – a story told from the point of view of a mutated, intelligent rat, living inside the walls of a starship. The viewpoint is consistent and the characters interestingly and creatively non-human. Giant Killer is, most likely, the seminal 'mutated somethings tangle with humanity' story. It is unfortunate that so many others have followed Chandler's lead with this theme over the years that the original can seem trite and cliche. In at least partial recognition of this story's contribution to the genre, it was nominated for a Retro-Hugo award in 1996, some fifty years after it was originally published.

His later works (once he broke out of the solar system) mostly tended to focus on the Rim Worlds (planets on the edge of the galaxy) and a few popular characters – The Empress Irene, Derek Calver and John Grimes of the Federation Survey Service.

The primary thing that sets Chandler apart from most of his contemporaries (and the thing that no doubt caught Ellison’s eye) was his ability to deal with sexual matters in a realistic, adult and sensible way. Sex is one of the universal motivators and Chandler did not shy away from injecting it into his stories. (Indeed, one of his first novels – Spartan Planet – deals with a planet inhabited entirely by male humans. Consider that this novel was first published in 1966 and you will have some idea of how much on the forefront of ‘modern science fiction’ Chandler really was.) On at least two occasions, his stories were bounced or delayed from publication because of an editor’s concern over its sexual content.

Another favorite theme was Chandler’s version of ‘the world as myth’. Several stories portray the author himself (or a close doppelganger named for one of his pseudonyms) meeting ‘alternate reality versions’ of himself, or influencing a future by interacting with fictional characters, or becoming a character in someone else’s myth. In his novel ‘The Dark Dimensions’, he even manages to borrow some characters from other authors (notably Dominic Flandry of Anderson’s series of the same name). If you thought the preceding description of world-as-myth was confusing, try reading one of them and keeping track of which John Grimes is who…

And finally, although it was most likely not intentional, he is one of the few science fiction authors of his era who has created a coherent, cohesive and well-developed ‘future history’. Chandler’s version, although never collected in the frontpiece of any of his books (like Heinlien’s future history or Niven’s history of known space) may very well have been the first one ever invented. Again, the good money is on Chandler NOT having created a future history deliberately. Rather, he seems to have fallen into it and allowed his creativity to reign. But the evidence is to be found in the books themselves; characters refer to historical events that are to be found in other stories, technology is consistent and evolves with time, even the window dressing remains consistent. At least some of this is due to his deliberate ‘filling in’ of his primary character’s past (he had all of the ‘later’ stories to refer to), but not all.

A short summary of Chandlers works would be ‘good, rollicking tales’. His stories are about everyday people and it may be the normalcy of the environments he wrote in that helped keep him from ‘grand master’ status. His main characters used intelligence and luck (and the occasional deus ex machine) to solve their problems, rather than inventing whole new branches of science. It may very well be that Chandler’s primary appeal – creating futuristic environments that feel like home – is also the very thing that kept him from achieving greater prominence. Chandler’s stories are like a favorite pair of slippers. They’re old and worn, but they fit perfectly. Its unlikely that you would ever bring them up in conversation. If you did, it would be to remark on how comfortable they are.

Chandler’s absence from the US convention scene (he was GOH on several occassions, but didn't make regular appearances like Asimov or Heinlein) may also have contributed to his secondary status. This is entirely understandable as he was working his ships, plying the waters of New Zealand, Australia and Asia. Authors in the US had many more opportunities to politic, to get to know editors and publishers, to keep their names appearing regularly in the fan magazines, the convention program books.

Over the years he has become a Grand Master of Australian SF; they’ve even named an annual award after him, but at this time it would take a concerted effort to get his name raised to the top shelf where it really belongs.

I always liked his stories and I’ll always continue to do so.

Which brings us back to the concordance.

About five years ago I was looking for something to do. I have an unfortunate habit of trying to turn all of my hobbies into businesses. (Some efforts have been successful, others not.) As I was between hobbies, I had a chance to reflect on that habit and I decided that what I really needed to do was to immerse myself in some meaningless activity that I most consciously was not going to make into a business. The fun and enjoyment would stem from the fact that I was just doing it (whatever it would be) to do it.

I thought at first of working on something that was of a relatively popular nature, but then I decided that it would be more fun to work on a project that centered on an overlooked subject. I soon realized that Chandler was one such subject. I had often speculated on whether his Rim Worlds/John Grimes stories were written in a shared universe, or if they were all stand-alones, even if they involved some of the same characters.

I went to my library and pulled everything Chandler and began reading. I then went searching for other works not in my collection and began collecting. (Ebay was a new and marvelous tool at this time.) I then decided that I needed a database to keep track of characters, histories and the trappings found in the stories.

I was well into this first incarnation when I lost the computer all of the data had been stored in. The only thing that remained was an improved Chandler section in the library and, out of frustration (I’d gotten most of the extant Grimes novels into that database) I gave up. (There’s nothing worse than re-writing something that's already been written, especially when it has to be rewritten exactly the same way as the earlier version, and MOST especially when you aren't under any real compulsion to do it.)

Then all kinds of personal things happened (not the least of which was getting married) and time went by.

Several months ago I found some original notes from that first effort and dove back into Chandlerania. I’ve recreated the database and am making fine progress. (This time its backed up on CD.) I’ve met some other Chandler fans and have begun to correspond with more.

The remainder of this site features all kinds of things relating to A. Bertram Chandler’s works and my concordance of those works. To find out the scope of the concordance, please see that section.

I’m having fun with the data gathered so far; for example, you’ll find an arrivals and departures page that lists all of the tramlines I’ve found so far in the books. If you want to book a trip from Earth to the Rim, that’s the place to find out how you’re going to get there.

The various data pages are works in progress. As I add to the databases, this information will be updated on the site. At the present time, these lists are really nothing more than names and hasty definitions – I’ll be rewriting all of them when the data entry phase has been completed.

There are many people who deserve thanks and mentions, so I’ll do that here:

Todd Bennett posted the first series of Chandler’s pages on the web and compiled a pretty good bibliography of the works. His ‘story order’ of the Grimes and Rim World is pretty accurate and has been published inside the Science Fiction Book Club’s omnibus editions of the John Grimes stories. We can’t find Todd these days – his website is only viewable at the internet archive.org site.

Keith Curtis of Dreamstone Press in Australia worked with Chandler’s widow – Susan (with whom Bertram co-authored at least one story and a person I hope one day to meet) – to publish a collection of stories in a special edition entitled “From Sea to Shining Star”, which is an invaluable resource of some of Chandler’s more difficult to find stories, and which features an absolutely fantastic piece of cover art by Nick Stathopoulos, who has graciously given me permission to reproduce both the cover and interior illustrations on this site - a task I hope to complete in the relatively near future.

David Kellerher is another Australian who’s keeping the torch lit. His www.bertramchandler.com page has the most complete bibliography of Chandler’s works, several electronic editions of stories, collections of non-fiction writings by Chandler and a wealth of other materials. David has been very helpful in my efforts.

Joshua Bilmes of the JABerwocky Literary Agency – is the agent for Chandler’s estate and has also been helpful in trying to track down stories and providing additional information about Chandler.

Ross Pavlac was an early fan of Chandler and also gathered together a bibliography and some other interesting materials for a convention program book honoring Chandler’s Guest appearance there. Ross unfortunately passed away several years ago. I’d met him a few times at various conventions and I’m saddened by his passing.