You might think, with all this struggle of writing that I became a kind of...

[Q] Ian Fleming?

Ian Fleming, yes.

[Q] Bond.

Bond, that's right.  Ian Fleming with Bond had an enormous success and so eventually, he said to his publishers, 'I can't do this anymore. Do you mind if I don't write another Bond book?' And they said, 'Oh, you've got to write another Bond book – they're so popular'. And so he became a slave to it.

Now, I've never become a slave to it. I've always… I've never asked permission from a publisher to write a book. I've written the book, and one of those books that I wrote was called – a facetious title – Billion Year Spree. And this was to settle the hash of an American contestant who thought that science fiction had been invented by X... I've forgotten his name, happily... as though there had been nothing beforehand. Now I knew that there had been a lot beforehand, and back in the 1870s there had been two enormous successes. One was about a world underground... I can't remember its title exactly... but there, the people underground were determined to come up. They had no electricity, but they had another power called Vyrl, V-y-r-l, Vyrl [sic] and this so took off. It was by a man who also wrote The Last Days of Pompeii – can you remember what his name was? No. Well, one could easily look it up.

Anyhow, Vyrl was so popular that I can think of two products... as England was expanding, there was room for Bovril. They used Vyrl as the title of this particular sweetmeat – Bovril – clever V-y-r-l, just B-o-v-r-i-l. And also, as a small boy, I had some very delicious kind of toffee medicine called Viril that also came from that same science fiction novel. Viril.

So that the snobs may be very superior about science fiction, but the fact is, it's had long-lasting effects. It is a way of thinking about one's incapacities. Most of my science fiction is about people's incapacities.