This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
For anyone who has ever aspired to write a science-fantasy saga, the tale of Cedric Lampwick will be highly instructive. Mr Lampwick, a certified accountant living in Hove, devoted many a long evening in the 1970s to the composition of a 200,000-word novel entitled The Chronicles of Magnesia.
The planet of the title lay in a remote galaxy. Magnesia was populated by bands of uncouth trolls, under the sway of the vengeful warrior queen Atalanta-Ra, who spoke a curious and not immediately intelligible language called xyrdrch, but Mr Lampwick helpfully supplied a glossary.
After receiving rejection letters from no fewer than 27 of the publishers whose names he had run to earth in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, Mr Lampwick was about to find some other hobby, when, at the very last moment, the book was accepted by a small independent firm.
Issued early in 1981 in a tiny edition with little publicity, it surprised everybody except its author by selling nearly a quarter of a million copies. The reviews were patronising in the extreme: The Times remarked that an infinitesimally small pinch of Tolkien had been diffused in a pool muddied by the feet of Michael Moorcock. But Lampwick, who had already said goodbye to certified accountancy, could not have cared less.
Naturally, a sequel was called for. The Conquest of Merganser II, in which Atalanta-Ra and her generals colonised a neighbouring planet with prodigious loss of life, sold even better than its predecessor.
By the time of his death in 1995, Lampwick had written another five “Magnesia novels”, as the franchise was styled, accumulated an estate valued at nearly £4 million and left a will instructing his only daughter to “take such steps as might be necessary” to keep his work fresh in the public mind.
Happily, Lampwick left a folder or two full of notes for future projects
To Diana, who had always admired her father and, in later years, acted as his secretary, this was an awesome responsibility she was determined to fulfil.
Happily, Lampwick turned out to have left a folder or two full of notes for future projects. These, written up by game sci-fi cognoscenti, appeared at intervals throughout the 2000s.
They had titles like The Destiny of Corophrax-El — this was Atalanta-Ra’s resourceful heir — and Diana, who had inherited her father’s business sense, was careful to offer their authors flat fees rather than a royalty.
With the publication of Onslaught from Dragonis-IX, featuring an intergalactic rebellion by various of Magnesia’s satellite planets, Diana was conscious that the well had begun to run dry.
But she was a resourceful manager of the Lampwick portfolio, and the ensuing decade realised Magnesia: A Companion, the Lampwick Family Album, Cedric Lampwick: A Critical Biography and even a guide to xyrdrch compiled by a comparative philologist from the University of Uppsala.
In her late sixties now, unmarried, with a hard grey eye and a no-nonsense attitude to journalists disposed to mock her father’s achievement, Diana has only one ambition left in life: to see Magnesia brought to the wide screen by a suitable director.
Sadly no one has yet met Diana’s exacting standards in this regard. It is doubtful whether anyone ever will.
