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18th July 1949.
William Olaf Stapledon Esq.
Dear Sir,
It is only with considerable hesitation that I write to you, this being, as it is, something of a presumption. Indeed, I would ask you to excuse me before I set out my reason as briefly as possible:
Since the middle of 1947 I have been working on a novel entitled "Tomorrow Sometimes Comes" and I had been hoping that Mr. Eden Phillpotts would write a short foreword or introduction to this, but Mr. Phillpotts last week wrote to me saying he now-a-days is too old and his reading (and writing) is very limited. As I feel that at present most publishers are of necessity not very favourably inclined towards the acceptance of young or unknown authors' work, and I believe any foreword, however short, by a writer of standing would enormously increase the chances of success of my novel, I am encouraged to go so far as to ask whether perhaps you could help e in this direction.
I should perhaps say the novem deals (in what I hope is an original way) with conditions possibly following a future widespread atomic war. I have had a few hundred thousand words of short stories of a science-fiction type accepted since the middle of the war, when I was forced to take up full-time the writing which had until then been only a hobby, and am 29. Ruby Millar mentions a number of publishers to whom I should send this MS. but I hesitate to do so without some introduction which would incline their attention towards it.
Thanking you for your kind attention,
I am, Sir,
Yours faithfully,
F. G. Rayer.
Olaf Stapledon at Wikipedia and from Amazon.co.uk also at SF-Encyclopedia
Eden Phillpotts: At SF-Encyclopedia, also at ISFDB, also At Amazon uk and at wikipedia
8th January 1950
Olaf Stapledon, Esq.
Dear Mr. Stapledon,
In August of last year I wrote to you asking if you might possibly be so kind as to consider writing a foreword to a futuristic novel I had written, and you replied that you might possibly be able to do so, and expressed willingness to see the Ms. You add that you could not writea foreword unless the book seemed very good, and this point has naturally made me hesitate. (To send you the MS. appears to indicate, that I think it may be very good!)
However, Home and Van Thal have accepted the story for publication, and this encourages me to enquire again whether you might have time to look at this MS., at present. I have not mentioned my hope that you might write a foreword to this or any other publisher, in view that this might have prejudiced them in favour of acceptance but now feel ready to go further into this point, should you feel that any time you may spend on the MS. would be justified.
Yours sincerely,
6th April 1950
Olaf Stapledon, Esq.
Dear Mr. Stapledon,
Thank you for your kind letter of the 11th of January, this year. I am sending the MS. of the science-fiction novel herewith.
I need not say that I shall await with the greatest interest any remarks you may have to make on this work.
The publishers have said that they would welcome an introduction or foreword from you, but naturally this is a point I must leave to you because you may not consider the MS. worthy. Should you feel that you might be able to do anything in this direction I should look upon it as a most encouraging and helpful favour.
With many thanks,
Sincerely yours,
18th April 1950
Olaf Stapledon, Esq.
Dear Mr. Stapledon,
Thank you for your letter of 12th of this month.
I am encouraged that you think my style quite good.
It is natural that I would like to hear your opinion as soon as possible, but on the other hand fully understand how you are placed and would not for a moment try to suggest that you would give any earlier attention to this MS. than you feel convenient.
With many thanks,
Yours faithfully
Home and Van Thal published Tomorrow Sometimes Comes in 1951. In 1953 the book was the fourth to be issued by the Science Fiction Book Club (UK) [Sidgwick and Jackson]. The SFBC review appears below. In 1954 the book was issued in Portugese and French. The next (and last) English publication was 1962 by Icon books. No foreword could be found in the three English editions that have been examined.
(Olaf Stapledon attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York City in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement. After a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack on 6th September 1950.)
Extracted from:
There is nothing of the hack about Rayer, whose To-morrow Sometimes Comes is the current Club selection. When we first read this book, which somehow seemed to have got passed over by reviewers*, we were sure it was one that would eventually get the recognition it deserved and publication in the Club does something to that end.
Andrew Marvell (author of Minimum Man) reviews his book below.
TOMORROW SOMETIMES COMES
by F. G. RAYER
(Home & Van Thal 9/6; S.F.B.C. 6/-)
ANDREW MARVELL writes
REVIEWERS still turn up their noses-a little less now- at Science Fiction. The average reviewer, hating fiction and with no belief in Science, is appalled by a book which fuses his two anathemas. The average reviewer prays for the average novel. In 1951, when Tomorrow Sometimes Comes was first published, a score of fingers must have flipped over its leaves in Grub Street. “Let’s see, who sleeps with whom and when and why and how: particularly how. What, no illicit beddings! Ah joy, here’s a murder. A whodunnit, perhaps? Blast it, no. There’s a hero, anyway. But dammit, he’s hundreds of years old! And hell, the villain seems to be a machine. Oh no, that’s too much. Why the devil don’t they send these things to the Times Engineering Journal for review?” A dead loss, in fact. Well not quite. It’s still worth 3/6 in the shop round the corner which so obligingly keeps the wife in pin money by buying up unreviewed review copies.
Well, what is Tomorrow Sometimes Comes to us, who are not average reviewers but average readers? It’s an odd, pungent, heart-shaking book compounded out of Rip Van Winkle, the Time Machine, fission physics, Mendel and the God of the Old Testament, not set in any particular place or any particular time, and told in the obsessive Kafka manner, heavy with Doom and weighted with Guilt. The core ofthe book is a nightmare Mechanical Brain, created by men like Frankenstein, and like Frankenstein, out of control, torturing poor humans by its absolute fidelity to truth and logic, a logic and truth which leads it to a single irrefutable conclusion: that Man Must Go. Some of its interviews with men have that horrid, verge-of-sanity tension which literature has not known since Raskolnikoff faced the Chief of Police in Crime and Punishment. What if the Machine had not turned sentimental towards the end . . ‘? And pro- vided the neatest climax I’ve read for a long time.
“The Science Fiction Book Club” is a registered business name (proprietors: Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd.).
Selection Committee: Arthur C. Clarke; Dr. J. G. Porter; Angus Wilson; E. J. Carnell.
Science Fiction News is edited by Herbert Jones and published by the Science Fiction Book Club for distribution to its members.
* Referring to reviews in the National Press. Reviews in Science Fiction publications before September 1953 were:
Slant No 6 (Winter 1951); New Worlds No 10, Summer 1951; Startling Stories February 1952; Amazing Stories June 1952.
Andrew Marvell: Pseudonym of Welsh editor and author Howell Davies (1896-1985). Minimum Man was first published (as The Near Future Minimum Man: Or, Time to be Gone) by Gollancz in 1938, reappeared in "Famous Fantastic Mysteries" in 1947 and was then issued by the SFBC in 1953 as the next book after "Tomorrow Sometimes Comes". He wrote two other futuristic stories.
Dr J G Porter: British Astronomical Association Computing Section Director, President of the Association from 1948, Principal Scientific Officer Royal Greenwich Observatory, broadcast "The Night Sky" on BBC Radio 1948-1961, an inspiration for Patrick Moore.