Author David I(rvine) Masson died 25 February 2007. Born 6 November 1915 in Edinburgh, Scotland, he was best known to the world as a librarian, having held posts at the Leeds University Library and the Liverpool University Library.
His science fiction career was brief, but notable. Between 1965 and 1967 he published seven stories in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds. After Moorcock rejected his eighth, he wrote only three more stories in the next few years. John Clute, writing in The Independent, says "the seven stories he published in New Worlds magazine between 1965 and 1967, and assembled as The Caltraps of Time (1968) [reissued in 2003], explore with quite extraordinary literary intensity a very wide range of subjects. Not one story resembles any other, except for the implacable polish that characterises everything he wrote. Caltraps reads like a selection of the best stories from a very long career; but Caltraps is all he wrote."
