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It's no diminishment of
the regrets I've expressed for previously deceased ASTRA
members, when I say that none will be more missed than Chris
Boyce, who died suddenly at his work in the Reference
Library of the Glasgow Herald on Tuesday 29th June, 1999.
This isn't the place to set out his many kindnesses to me
over the years, but it's a great loss to me as well as to
the society.
I first met Chris in
1967. I had just made my first professional sale to Amazing
Stories, and Chris had already appeared three times in
Impulse, twice with cover art by Keith Roberts. He was
working then in the Technical Section of the Mitchell
Library. I was in a singers' workshop called Folk Song
Repertory at the time, and a member called Willie Ross told
me Chris wanted to meet me. We hit it off from the outset
and Chris quickly joined ASTRA, taking an active part in the
early stages of the Interstellar Project. In 1970 and 1971
Chris gave us three highly original talks, 'On the
Interpreting of Extraterrestrial Cultures', which were
printed in Spacereport and one was reprinted in Asgard. When
we decided to expand the Interstellar Project with the
Extraterrestrial Contact discussions which became Part 2 of
"Man and the Stars", the original plan was for Chris to
write that section of the book. For a time we were meeting
in the ASTRA rooms in Hamilton on Saturday mornings for
joint work sessions on it. But with mounting other
commitments, including becoming engaged to Angela Mullane,
in the end Chris wrote only the introductory chapter to that
section.
Meanwhile Chris and I
were running the Glasgow SF Circle, first at the Granville
Bar and then more formally at the Charing Cross Hotel, with
a programme kept in step and jointly announced with ASTRA's.
In 1974 Chris won the Gollancz/Sunday Times SF novel
competition with "Catchworld". We found this out only ten
days before the award was to be given at the Eastercon in
Newcastle, and I set myself the task of organising a
supporters' bus from ASTRA and the SF Circle, although I
couldn't tell anyone why they had to be there. Jim Campbell,
Robert Shaw, John Kelk, Bill Ramsay, and Gavin Roberts were
among the ASTRA contingent. "Catchworld" and "Man and the
Stars" were published almost simultaneously, and the Isobel
Begg chat show we appeared on together on STV was a
highlight of that year. One of his prize possessions from
that time was the original of a special SF issue, for him,
of Ewan Bain's 'Angus Og' comic strip in the Daily Record,
where Chris was working in the library at the time. The
Chris Boyce/Duncan Lunan double act featured at a number of
events over the years, including a sales conference at the
launch of the IBM PC, and a seminar at Glasgow University
Dept. of Adult & Continuing Education. The SF Circle
eventually moved at Chris's suggestion to the Admiral Bar on
Waterloo Street, as a social night on the first Wednesday of
each month, with an ASTRA one two weeks later. The standing
joke was that at the SF Circle everyone talked about
spaceflight and at the ASTRA meeting everyone talked about
SF.
In 1973 ASTRA began the
Interplanetary Project, again with Chris heavily involved,
and the last chapter of "Man and the Planets" is based on
his talks on von Neumann probes and on mind-machine
interactions. The chapter is to be reprinted in the second
volume of Samo Resnik's "Fantasia" book series, in Slovenia.
In the 1976 crisis ASTRA was saved by Chris Boyce and Jim
Campbell, who took over the running of the society at a
crucial time and kept it going until the Memorandum and
Articles of the society as a limited company came into
effect. When the new ASTRA rooms were opened Chris gave one
of the first lectures on O'Neill habitats and he contributed
articles on them to Asgard and to the "Pulsar" science
fiction series edited for Penguin by George Hay, the Space
Settlers and ASTRA honorary member who died in
1998.
"Brainfix", published in
1980, suffered an ironic twist of fate. Chris had difficulty
placing the novel because it kept coming true: the first
draft had Russia invading Afghanistan in 1988 and America
withdrawing from the Olympics in protest, whereupon it
happened ten years early. Even then publishers found it too
hard to believe: not the nationwide use of mind-altering
drugs by a government determined to stay in power, not the
wiring up of the SAS into a single mental entity as an
instrument of repression, not the nuclear 'accident'
arranged with the Americans after Scotland becomes
independent, no, they were easy to believe. But three
million unemployed in Britain - fantasy! But it had already
happened by the time the book came out and a couple of years
later, when a signed copy came up for auction at a
convention, the cry was "What am I bid for this piece of
science fact? Chris was a stalwart of Glasgow SF conventions
which began in the late 1970's, and was Guest of Honour at
several of them. He had several short stories in the German
SF series "Science Fiction Story Reader" and in the US
magazine Aboriginal SF, with both of which I put him in
touch.
Chris took part in
several National Children's Book Week programmes which we
organised, and in the 'SF Writers' Weekend' which we
organised as part of ASTRA's High Frontier exhibition in
1979, at the Third Eye Centre and Glasgow Film Theatre.
Chris had a particular fondness for SF movies: he went to
see 2001, a Space Odyssey so many times in Cinerama that the
theatre staff gave him complimentary tickets - Chris said
they thought he wrote it. In the last few years he had
organised several ASTRA visits to films like Deep Impact and
Armageddon. During the 1970s Chris was developing his model
for simulating extraterrestrial encounter situations,
test-firing them at meetings in the ASTRA rooms. The first
public simulation was run at our 'High Frontier' exhibition
in 1979, after Chris published "Extraterrestrial Encounter a
Personal Perspective", to which I contributed a guest
chapter in turn. We had in mind that this would be an
on-going engagement, but I haven't yet found a publisher for
"Search Among the Stars", the next one I had in mind. The
publishers, David & Charles, ran a public opinion poll
on reactions to ET Contact to coincide with publication.
Having perfected the ET Encounter simulation technique,
Chris ran many of them at SF conventions, usually with ASTRA
participation, including a very big one at the 1995 Worldcon
in Glasgow. He had a big elaborate one in reserve featuring
H.G. Well's 'War of the Worlds' happening in the present
day, which now we won't be able to play. Mars and Well's
invasion had a particular fascination for Chris: to his
regret he didn't find a publisher for "Martians", a major
novel set in the present as it might be if the invasion had
actually taken place. It was quite appropriate that his
coffin was carried into the crematorium to the Mars movement
from the Planets Suite - and even more appropriate that we
left to 'Jupiter the bringer of Jollity'.
In 1980 Chris gave a
series of lectures on Cosmology to ASTRA and at the same
time ran a series of teaching sessions in the ASTRA rooms
with his new Pet computer. For many ASTRA members that was
their first experience of the new cyber revolution. In the
early 1980's when I was living with Chris and Angel he took
over production of ASTRA circulars on a more advanced
machine, and when he moved to the Glasgow Herald as it then
was, and was the prime mover in computerising their
reference library. He wrote many articles on computing and
on space for the Herald, and often helped ASTRA members with
their computer problems. Unfortunately his attempt to create
a bulletin board for ASTRA fell foul of the society's
internal politics at the time. Also in the mid-80's he
hosted several ASTRA AGMs, and committee meetings for our
attempt to bring the Brunel University Space School to
Glasgow. In 1989 he lectured at our commemorative Apollo
anniversary exhibition in Princes Square, and he also gave a
reading at one of our anniversary events at Cottier's
Theatre.
At the end of the 1980's
Chris, Angela and Alasdair Gray formed Dog & Bone
Publishing, which published Chris's mainstream thriller
"Blooding Mister Naylor" and Archie Roy's psychic research
memoir, "A Sense of Something Strange", as well as doing the
layout and typesetting for "Starfield" the anthology of
science fiction by Scots which I edited for Orkney Press.
The cover story was "The Rig", which had been the first of
Chris's to catch my attention in Impulse with a cover by
Keith Roberts; this time it was painted by Sydney Jordan, in
two versions, and at the launch we made Chris a present of
the first one. The second featured on the book jacket and in
ASTRA's 'Urban Spaceman' art exhibition, at the 90's
Gallery, the Edinburgh International Science Festival, and
elsewhere.
More recently Chris was
becoming actively involved in ASTRA again as his children
reached their teens. He supported the discussion projects on
Andy Paterson's space art and Chris O'Kane's Mars Project,
and in 1998 launched one of his own to review
"Extraterrestrial Encounters" after twenty years. The ET
Presence discussions were based on highly original papers by
Chris himself and he had begun writing the new book, asking
Andy Nimmo and me to read and comment chapter by chapter.
Unfortunately only the first chapter was finished.
Chris arranged the use
of the Herald Library's photocopiers to produce the '45
Years of ASTRA' history at the end of 1998, and he had been
supporting ASTRA financially since the beginning of 1999,
helping the society to weather the problems caused by the
recent dip in membership. He and Angela also allowed ASTRA
to store our library in their loft after we were required to
move it from Airdrie Observatory. In the last week of his
life he began to create a new website for ASTRA's central
programme. Chris had chaired a planning meeting for that
programme in 1998, one result of which was Jamie McLean's
Fantasy Space Programme, in which he gave Jamie a great deal
of support, making a big effort to attend the meeting at the
end of June, only days before his death. He exchanged
multiple e-mails with Andy Nimmo about the website that
weekend, and the night he died I was to have gone along to
the Herald Library to see what headway they were making.
Apparently the event was instantaneous and he keeled over in
mid-sentence while talking to a colleague. The website is
now well advanced in preparation and is still based on the
format Chris had e-mailed to Andy.
Chris is survived by
Angela and by their daughters Petra and Toni to whom the
ASTRA members and Council extend their deepest
sympathy.
-o0o-
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 LEN
CARTER
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