About a week after I started university, there was a science fiction festival at Beverley, just up the road. I think this was a one off but it was my first chance to hear sf writers speak.

(That’s not quite true — Nicholas Fisk and John Gordon had both been to my school for some precursor to World Book Day. First adult sf writers?)

Bob Shaw gave one of his Serious Scientific Talks and Nicola Griffith was there, I suspect just before her InterZone debut. No doubt there were others — but the Brian Aldiss Chatshow was clearly going to be the highlight. Rowlie Wymer — who would supervise my PhD — was there, as was Aldiss and I suspect at least two other men, with Lisa Tuttle and SMS mentioned in a plug in Matrix.

Ian Watson joined the stage and entertained us for several minutes, until one of the organisers wanted a word with him about something. He never returned; Aldiss, meawhile, started to talk, having been silent thus far. I don’t think we thought anything of it, until another woman burst in accusing Aldiss of having Watson thrown off the panel.

It wasn’t at all clear what had happened — whether there’s been some rivalry over something arcane about the Science Fiction Foundation or a review of Trillion Year Spree had hurt feelings. The sf world was an explosive one — and some of its authors were entertaining speakers.

Watson could raise hackles — a story in InterZone proved controversial, as possibly did a story about snails in Semiotext(e) SF. I only read a handful of the novels and The Very Slow Time Machine collection, but he was a great ideas man. I suspect I wasn’t yet ready for him — and I came to The Embedding quite late.

We overlapped on an Arthur C. Clarke Award jury — possibly the year of The Calcutta Chromosome — and I have patchy memories of a rather boozy meal at a Polish restaurant near South Kensington tube. There was borscht. There was some kind of potato. There was more booze.

After that, I don’t recall many more encounters — presumably at the odd Eastercon (a meal at The Magpie at one of the Heathrow Eastercons) and at the Dublin worldcon (I had a lazy zip on a pair of jeans, which he pointed out to me). I don’t recall commissioning him for Vector. By then he was in Spain and we were Facebook friends. He always seemed to be joking.

Sometimes even when requested not too. Getting others to acknowledge your own failure of humour is a fool’s game.

And now he has left us — another of the giants of British sf in the 1970s. I don’t think anyone has written anything substatial about him academically, beyond The Embedding. Perhaps he was too challenging — but someone should try.