Biography
To steal from Dickens and begin at the beginning, David Mace was born in Sheffield, UK. At the time he would have said "Sheffield, England," but by the grace of Whatever he's managed to unload a little of that unthinking chauvinism over the years. David was born in the Jessop Hospital, and used to know the window of the room where he was born. Nowadays he wouldn't even know if the Jessop still exists. It's been a long time since Sheffield.
David grew up in Broomhill, surrounded by far more famous people. Sebastian Coe was four streets away, a glam-rock star (no, not the infamous one) lived fifteen minutes walk distant, and Joe Cocker's mum was just up the hill on Crookes. Cocker's lead guitarist was expelled from David's school (before his time), and Jeff Rawle was a contemporary. These people all did rather well. There was also, in the background…
David's only British educational distinction was to drop out of the same year af the same architecture course twice in succession. All he'd really ever wanted to be was a writer. In those days David read masses of stuff, mostly science fiction. The one that "did" it for him and set the rocky course of his life was Arthur C Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END. He's since discovered how many sf readers had the same epiphany with the same book. It's something to do with the scope, scale, mysticism and tragedy. The revelation of sympathetic aliens was pretty important, too. (The xenophobic kill-it-cos-it's-different attitude wouldn't be for him…).
The last thing that happened in Sheffield was DEMON-4, which David wrote just before leaving. After that it was an exciting new life in Freiburg, Germany. Seven wonderful years in the most beautiful place he's ever known - during which time he graduated from hamburger cook to mature student, obtaining an M.A. in linguistics.
Those seven years were crucial. He learned German. He learned that Germans are not the Erbfeind but human beings exactly like everyone else he ever met, and despite the endless racism they get from us, are incurable Anglophiles. They also have a better, sharper and more political sense of humour than we can boast. Most important, he learned that England isn't the centre of everything. It isn't the centre of anything. It's just one of the parts. He became a European. Unpopular, but there you go.
He returned to the UK, now established as a professional writer. Which went well until…
Early in the 1990s there was a sharp and very nasty recession. Publishing was hit. Hodder and Stoughton, David's publisher, fell into predatory hands. Like all the other mainstream houses, they shed authors in panic. David lost two commissioning editors in rapid succession, and his agent also went into stasis. His next agent started very well, but became seriously ill. Trying to find another, it was too late. Mainstream British publishing had been bought by the big corporations and had changed. He'd been missing for almost two years, and they told him he had no track record. Seven published novels no longer counted. And the agencies? All he got was offers to take ten percent of the contract after he'd secured it unaided. Apparently agents no longer read manuscripts or promoted authors. Everything had changed.
He managed to establish himself as a translator. Turned out he was quite good at it. Trouble was, translation wasn't what he wanted to do.
It was therapy, really. We all need a reason for being, and writing is what David does best. Science fiction is one of the most difficult genres to write, but also most fun. Thanks to the support of Interzone David has had the chance once again to find what matters most to a writer - a reader. The whole reason for writing is communication - this experience, this interpretation, this possibility, this fear, this hope - all those human questions. And, of course, dreams. Life's made of dreams…
DAVID MACE is part Ukrainian, part German, a bit French and the rest is the Scandinavian-Saxon-Roman-Celtic mix commonly known as English. He has an M.A. in linguistics (Deutsche Philologie und Englische Philologie) from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg. He lives in North Lancashire.
He likes to divide his time between: writing; the gym; salsa; lots of obligatory things he doesn't much like; and films, which he does. He has access to nearby Lancaster's excellent Dukes independent cinema and sees a lot of films, more often foreign than not. His excuse for watching so many is the value of learning from the medium's sharpness and compression of story, which is crucial in modern writing, but the truth is he likes the films.