A Bertram Chandler

A (Arthur) Bertram Chandler was born in Aldershot, England in 1912, Chandler sailed the world in every-thing from tramp steamers to troop transports before emigrating to Australia in 1956. Here he commanded merchant vessels under the Australian and New Zealand Flags up to his retirement in 1974.

Up until his death in 1984 he published over 40 science fiction novels and over 200 works of short fiction writing as A Bertram Chandler, George Whitley or Andrew Dunstan. Many of the novels had a nautical theme, with the plot moved from the seas of earth to the ships of space in the future. Many of the stories revolved around the character of John Grimes some times referred to as “Hornblower of Space”. While most stories are set in the future, they also have a distinctly “Australian” theme with places and stories relating back to Australia today.

Chandler was the last master of the aircraft carrier Melbourne. Law required it to have a master aboard for the months while it was laid up and waiting to be towed off to Asia to be broken up for scrap, so in a sense he really was briefly the master of the Australian navy's former flagship. Apparently he had his typewriter aboard, and worked on his novels!

Chandler received four Australian SF Achievement Award "Ditmars" for his novels. Nearly all of his novels were published in the USA. Two of his short stories 'The Cage' and 'Giant Killer’ are regarded as some of the best SF stories written in the 1950's. He was also very popular in Japan winning the prestigious SEIUN SHO, the premier Science Fiction award. The Japanese editions have some of the best covers of any of the published editions.(Click Here for more details).

Missing Chandler Published

A new John Grimes story has finally been published more than 24 years after A Bertram Chandler's death. The story is called Grimes and the Gaijin Daimyo and is part of the Kitty Kelly series. It is part of a new Australian Anthology called Dreaming Again edited by Jack Dann and is a follow up to Jack Dann and Janeen Webb's successful Dreaming Down Under anthology.  The book has been published by Harper Voyager in Australia and and should be available in all good bookshops as of July 2008.  (US publication date should be September 2008, Amazon has preorders from the following link Dreaming Again: Thirty-five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction)

Thanks to Paul Collins for making the story available more than 30 years after he purchased it.

Updates

Please make sure you check out the new Rim Worlds site. The Rim Worlds Concordance is at www.rimworlds.com

I have added a photo gallery for all those pictures you took from that last trip to the Rim Worlds (Rim Worlds Photo Gallery).

All the John Grimes novels are now available from Baen Books at www.webscription.net. It's a great chance to add those missing novels and stories to your collection. Also Giant Killer was republished in the June 2007 edition of Jim Baen's Universe.

French Publisher les moutons électriques have published La Route des Confins (The Road to the Rim). Further details and ordering information can be found here.

All the John Grimes stories have been reprinted by the SFBC in America, the last being John Grimes:Rim Commander published at the end of 2005. Wales Publishers in Czechoslovakia have published the first two novels in the John Grimes series.