Maybe it was even time to consider writing a second draft of one of these works of patent genius, rather than trusting that London publishers would have the wit to recognise an obvious rough diamond who, a trifling number of easily polished awkwardnesses having been dealt with, was surely about to make the ungrateful wretches millions. Maybe I should try writing an ordinary, boring, mainstream novel. Maybe I wasn't just an SF writer, after all. More rejection slips from a smaller number of publishers, as fewer had SF lists within which to bring my deathless prose to an unsuspecting but, I was certain, ultimately extravagantly appreciative and indeed rightly thankful public.

I enjoyed the classics and loved contemporary mainstream literature, but I adored science fiction as the exemplary arena of the unfettered imagination, and so that was what I would write, probably for the rest of my career, once I actually had one. The following three novels, written between 19, were SF, because I'd decided that was what I was: a science fiction writer. That one was typed, and eventually accrued an impressive collection of publishers' rejection slips. Lacking a built-in off switch, it tumoured its way to about 400,000 words before I finally got the blighter wrestled to the ground and tied off. The next novel owed something - arguably an apology - to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and remains the only book I've ever started without a plan. It was written in pencil in an old ship's logbook, and I didn't even bother typing it up I'd already decided it was juvenilia.

I'd wanted to be a writer since primary school and had started trying to write novels when I was 14, finally producing something loosely fitting the definition two years later: a spy story crammed with sex and violence (I still scorn the idea of only writing what you know about). At the start of 1980 I thought of myself as a science fiction writer, albeit a profoundly unpublished one.

The wasp factory book